Low power ultra-wideband wireless telemetry system for capsule endoscopy application

A low power wireless telemetry system for capsule endoscopy is presented in this paper. The proposed system is based on impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) technology, it consists of a UWB transmitter utilizing fast on-off LC VCO and a non-coherent UWB receiver using energy detection. The whole system is implemented in 0.18-µm CMOS process and integrated in a single chip with 3 mm × 4 mm chip size. The measurement results show that the transmitter consumes ultra low average power of 2.5mW at 10Mbps data rate and the receiver draw 40 mA current under 1.8V power supply. An ex-vivo animal experiment shows that the proposed system can successfully transmit the real-time image data out from the capsule to the external base station.