Body Channel Communication (BCC) utilizes the body surface as a low-loss signal transmission medium, reducing the power consumption of wireless wearable devices. However, the effective communication range on the human body is limited in the state-of-the-art BCC transceivers, where the signal loss between the body surface and the BCC receiver remains one of the main bottlenecks. To reduce the interface loss, a high input impedance is desired by the BCC receiver, but the DC-biasing circuits decrease the input impedance. In this work, a dynamically-sampling IFE is proposed to eliminate the DC voltage bias, resulting in a 90kΩ; high input impedance and a 94dB RF—IF conversion gain to reduce the interface loss in long-range BCC applications. The BCC transceiver chip is fabricated in 55nm CMOS process, taking a die area of 0.123mm². Measured results show that the chip extends the BCC range to 2m for both the forward and backward paths, where the transmitter and receiver consume 711μW power in total.

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Body Channel Communication (BCC) offers a low-loss signal transmission medium for ultra-low-power wearable devices on human body [1]. However, the effective communication range on human body is limited to less than 1m in the state-of-the-art BCC transceivers [2], where the signal loss at the interface of body surface and BCC receiver remains to be one of the main bottlenecks. The limited communication range has blocked the popularization in many WBAN applications, such as signal transmission from to an intelligent insole to smart watch [3]. Relative to the high impedance of human body [4], the lower input impedance of BCC receiver induces significant signal loss. To reduce the interface loss, conventional interface front end (IFE) of BCC receivers was designed to be with a high input impedance [5], but the DC voltage bias decreased both the input impedance and signal gain of IFE.@en