TY - JOUR
T1 - A programmable biopotential aquisition front-end with a resistance-free current balancing instrumentation amplifier
AU - Faragó, Paul
AU - Groza, Robert
AU - Hintea, Sorin
AU - Söser, Peter
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - The development of wearable biomedical equipment benefits from low-power and low-voltage circuit techniques for reduced battery size and battery, or even battery-less, operation. This paper proposes a fully-differential low-power resistance-free programmable instrumentation amplifier for the analog front-end of biopotential monitoring systems. The proposed instrumentation amplifier implements the current balancing technique. Low power consumption is achieved with subthreshold biasing. To reduce chip area and enable integration, passive resistances have been replaced with active equivalents. Accordingly, the instrumentation amplifier gain is expressed as the ratio of two transconductance values. The proposed instrumentation amplifier exhibits two degrees of freedom: one to set the desired range and the other for finetuning of the voltage gain. The proposed IA is employed in a programmable biopotential acquisition front-end. The programmable frequency-selective behavior is achieved by having the lower cutoff frequency of a Gm-C Tow-Thomas biquad varied in a constant-C tuning approach. The proposed solutions and the programmability of the operation parameters to the specifications of particular bio-medical signals are validated on a 350nm CMOS process.
AB - The development of wearable biomedical equipment benefits from low-power and low-voltage circuit techniques for reduced battery size and battery, or even battery-less, operation. This paper proposes a fully-differential low-power resistance-free programmable instrumentation amplifier for the analog front-end of biopotential monitoring systems. The proposed instrumentation amplifier implements the current balancing technique. Low power consumption is achieved with subthreshold biasing. To reduce chip area and enable integration, passive resistances have been replaced with active equivalents. Accordingly, the instrumentation amplifier gain is expressed as the ratio of two transconductance values. The proposed instrumentation amplifier exhibits two degrees of freedom: one to set the desired range and the other for finetuning of the voltage gain. The proposed IA is employed in a programmable biopotential acquisition front-end. The programmable frequency-selective behavior is achieved by having the lower cutoff frequency of a Gm-C Tow-Thomas biquad varied in a constant-C tuning approach. The proposed solutions and the programmability of the operation parameters to the specifications of particular bio-medical signals are validated on a 350nm CMOS process.
KW - Analog processing circuits
KW - Biomedical monitoring
KW - Biomedical signal processing
KW - Operational amplifiers
KW - Programmable circuits
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85047865716&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.4316/AECE.2018.02011
DO - 10.4316/AECE.2018.02011
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85047865716
SN - 1582-7445
VL - 18
SP - 85
EP - 92
JO - Advances in Electrical and Computer Engineering
JF - Advances in Electrical and Computer Engineering
IS - 2
ER -