System-in-package solution for a low-power active electrode module

This paper presents the design of system in package for a low-power active electrode module. The main aim of this research is to provide a low-cost, high-density, and high-quality module, exploiting the features of a System-in-Package (SiP) solution. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first time that SiP technology has been used in the development of a modular active electrode. Two SiPs have been designed and one of them has been fabricated and tested. The dimensions of the latter are 7×7×1 mm and it was designed taking in account the necessity of soldering it by hand. On the contrary, the other package dimensions are 4.5×4.5×1 mm and it was designed for fully exploiting the latest technologies available to authors. The SiPs have been designed to be reused in different electrocardiogram (ECG) systems and are easy to solder using ball grids arrays (BGA) and land grids arrays (LGA) as second level interconnection; both these features allow to reduce the time to market of the supra-system including the module. The active electrode presents a bandwidth which ranges from 7.9m Hz to 300 Hz and it has a mid-band gain which can be set to a maximum value of 40 dB. The fabricated SiP has been tested on a printed circuit board (PCB), with an input signal generated by a Dimetek iBUSS-P biomedical signal simulator showing a satisfying functioning of the SiP.