Ultra Low Power programmable biomedical SoC for on-body ECG and EEG processing

An Ultra Low Power (ULP) biomédical System-on-Chip (SoC) has been developed for efficient ECG/EEG signal processing in a Body Area Network environment. This experimental SoC explores the use of event-driven peripheral modules that autonomously interact with external sensors together with the use of an Application-Specific-Instruction-set-Processor (ASIP) to optimize energy-efficiency during active and sleep periods. The SoC has been manufactured in standard 90nm CMOS process and use has been made of power gating to reduce leakage power that starts to become more dominant in advanced technologies. When running an ECG algorithm that is capable of reliably detecting the QRS complex in an ambulatory environment, an average power consumption of 10 μW has been measured at 0.7 V supply.