Energy-Efficient Level Crossing ADC for Bio-Medical Applications: High-Precision Signal Acquisition with Ultra-Low Power Consumption

Abstract

In modern biomedical monitoring systems, they demand continuous high precision signals capturing with a low power consumption. An analog to digital conversion is thus necessary which is energy efficient. LCADCs reduce the number of redundant operations in analog to digital conversion by only sampling the input signal when it reaches a specified voltage level. This method is very appropriate to biomedical signal (low-frequency) where the fluctuation of signal occurs regularly over time like ECG, EEG. The proposed LC-ADC architecture is designed to achieve ultra-low power consumption, high accuracy and resolution for wearable and portable healthcare applications. The adaptive threshold-based sampling can effectively process signals in real-time with less redundant data transformation, which brings better energy efficiency and computing efficiency. The design is implemented in Cadence Virtuoso with 45 nm CMOS technology and shows excellent performance figures such as SNDR of 90.2 dB, ENOB of 14.69 bits and FOM of 178.3 dB with a power consumption of only 0.67 µW. The experimental outcomes confirm the usefulness of the suggested LC-ADC architecture for the nextgeneration low power biomedical diagnostics and patient monitoring applications.