A 0.3 V, 56 dB DR, 100 Hz fourth order low-pass filter for ECG acquisition system

Abstract

This paper proposes an extremely low voltage, low power bulk-driven voltage follower (BD-VF). As an application of the proposed BD-VF, a 4th order low-pass filter (LPF) with cutoff frequency adjustable from 50 Hz to 250 Hz is designed for electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition systems. The filter is implemented in UMC 180 nm CMOS technology occupying only 0.03 mm2 area. Post layout simulation results show that the filter offers 56 dB dynamic range even with an extremely low supply voltage of 0.3 V. The total power consumption of the filter is 4.8 nW for a cutoff frequency of 100 Hz. The Figure-of-merit (FoM) and capacitance/pole of the filter are 5.7 × 10−15 and 2.2 pF respectively. The proposed filter offers the lowest FoM compared to the state-of-the-art nW-class filters.