A low-power 2.4-GHz receiver for wireless implantable neural stimulators

This paper presents a 2.4 GHz low-power CMOS On-Off Keying receiver front-end which contains a low noise amplifier with a novel down conversion mixer that is designed for wireless forward telemetry link in neural stimulation applications. The transceiver operates between 2.4 and 2.5 GHz to support the full industrial, scientific and medical band. The post-layout simulation results show that the fully integrated low-noise amplifier exhibits a gain of 15 dB, a noise figure of 1 dB at 2.4 GHz, and the input matching (S11) is -16 dB. The proposed mixer is resistor-less and designed based on current starved delay elements in a Gilbert topology. The transceiver implemented in a TSMC 0.18 μm CMOS technology uses a supply voltage of 1.2 V, supports a data rate of up to 100 Mbps, and consumes 7 mW. The total size of the proposed receiver front-end equals 0.38 mm2.

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