Sami ur Rehman

Following slides are prepared with main help from a thesis titled

A 0.8-V Low Power Analog Front-End IC for Biomedical Signal Recording

By Shuo-Ting Kao

Electrical Signals generating within our bodies are termed as bio signals These low voltage signals propagate along nerve cells or muscle fiber They are detected by placing electrodes on the body surface silver -silver-chloride electrodes (Ag AgCl) are most commonly used electrodes

Also called brain waves EEG Electroencephalogram (EEG refers to the recording of the brain's spontaneous electrical activity) several channels of the EEG are recorded simultaneously from various locations on the scalp for comparative analysis of activities in different regions of the brain

The ECG is the electrical manifestation of the contractile activity of the heart The rhythm of the heart in terms of beats per minute {bpm) may be easily estimated by counting the readily identifiable waves

Muscular potential Skeletal muscle fibers are considered to be twitch fibers because they produce a mechanical twitch response for a single stimulus and generate a propagated action potential.

Generally, in order to read out the biopotentials, two skin electrodes sticking on the body. However, bio-potential are commonly low frequency small signals, and there are three issues. First, the major one is the flicker noise. Due to low frequency signals, the charge carriers are trapped easily by dangling bonds, which appear at the interface between gate oxide and silicon substrate, and later released by the energy states, introducing flicker noise in the drain current.

Second, another issue is power-line interference. Power line signal 50/60Hz coupled to the human body is not negligible compared to the bio-potential signals. Third, the other one is the differential electrode offset (DEO), which comes from the difference of two electrodes DC level. For conventional AgCl electrodes, the DEO can be as high as 50mv and the DEO changes with time slowly.

ELIMINATING FLICKER NOISE AND COMMON MODE NOISE: BY THE USE OF INSTRUMENTATION AMPLIFIER WITH VERY HIGH CMRR ELIMINATING DIFFERENTIAL ELECTRODE VOLTAGE (DEO), ALSO CALLED DC OFFSET VOLTAGE: THROUGH THE MOTHOD OF CHOPPING, ELABORATED FURTHERAHEAHD

TYPES: DEVICE NOISE.NOISE INHERENT TO THE STRUCTURE OF THE DEVICE. INCLUDES FLICKER NOISE AND THERMAL NOISE THERMAL NOISE: ALSO CALLED WHITE NOISE its noise power spectrum density is constant over a given frequency thermal noise comes from the random motion of electrons in conductors Flicker Noise The flicker noise spectral density is inversely proportional to frequency, so it is also called 1/f noise.

INPUT SHIFTED TO HIGH FREQUENCY, LOW FREQUENCY INPUT SIGNAL IS MODULATED, AMPLIFIED AND THEN BROUGHT BACK TO LOW BASEBAND FREQUENCY. OFFSET IS MODULATED TO HIGH FREQUENCY AND THE BASEBAND SIGNAL IS THEN EXTRACTED USING LOW PASS FILTER.

It includes a fully-differential folded-cascode opamp, a gm-c filter, three NMOS chopper and capacitors. Since the CMOS chopper is unable to work at a low supply voltage environment, the bootstrapped NMOS chopper is adopted without reliability issue. There are two feedback paths in the system. One is for setting the closed-loop gain and the other is for cancelling DEO. The capacitive closed-loop configuration dissipates less power than the resistive feedback one. Note that the demodulation of the signal is inside the opamp

Following slides are prepared with help from a paper titled

A 90nm CMOS Bio-Potential Signal Readout Front-End with Improved Powerline Interference Rejection By
Chon-Teng Ma, Pui-In Mak, Mang-I Vai, Peng-Un Mak, Sio-Hang Pun, Wan Feng and R. P. Martins

This paper describes a 90nm CMOS low-noise low-power biopotential signal readout front-end (RFE). The front-stage instrumentation amplifier (IA) features a chopper; an AC-coupler and a novel chopper notch filter for minimizing the dc-offset; transistors' flicker noise and 50Hz powerline interference concurrently. A noise-aware transistor selection (thin- and thick-oxide) in the IA enables a flexible tradeoff between noise and input impedance performances. The 2nd stage is a spike filter clocked by a parallel use of two non-overlapping clock generators, effectively tracking and suppressing the chopper spikes. The last stage is a gain-bandwidth-controllable amplifier for boosting the gain and alleviating different bio-potential signal measurements through simple digital controls. Simulation results showed that the RFE is capable of tolerating a differential electrode offset up to 50mV, while achieving 140dB CMRR and 51.4nV/Hz inputreferred noise density. The notch at 50Hz achieves 41dB rejection. The entire RFE consumes 16.55 to 35.5A at 3V.

AC coupling is used to generate the same spectrum of DEO and IA offset and applied in feedback, resultantly both offsets are cancelled. Notch filter need to be used to eliminate AC signal interference Now the noise free signal can be demodulated and fed to Delta Sigma Modulator for digitizing purpose