A 16.6-pJ/b 150-Mb/s body channel communication transceiver with decision feedback equalization improving >200% area efficiency

This paper presents the fastest and most energy efficient body channel communication transceiver integrated into the smallest chip area. To enhance data rate with limited human body channel bandwidth, decision feedback equalization technique is adopted to body channel communication for the first time. The transceiver, fabricated in 65 nm CMOS technology, reliably (BER < 10−6) achieves the maximum data rates of 150 Mb/s and 100 Mb/s over 20-cm and 1.0 m human body channels at costs of 16.6 pJ/b and 23.5 pJ/b. Even with the drastic performance improvements, the transceiver only occupies an area of 5580 μm2, which is of less than 1% compared to any previously presented works. This remarkable area efficiency verifies the superiority of the proposed design's simplicity of and efficiency.