A New Optical UWB Modulation Technique for 250Mbps Wireless Link in Implantable Biotelemetry Systems

Abstract

We propose an optical UWB modulation based on a new pulsed coding technique for wireless implantable biotelemetry. The solution employs sub-nanosecond laser pulses allowing for both high data rates and reduction of the power consumption compared to the state-of-the-art. Thus, the proposed approach is suitable for upcoming biomedical systems like autonomous implantable neural devices. The developed architecture consists of a transmitter and a receiver employing a pulsed semiconductor laser and a small sensitive area photodiode, respectively, and includes coding and decoding digital systems, biasing and driving analogue circuits for laser pulse generation and photodiode signal conditioning. Experimental findings, obtained by employing discrete components prototype PCBs and FPGA implementations, validate the novel technique showing the capabilities to achieve a BER less than 10-9 with data rates up to 250Mbps and an estimated power consumption lower than 5mW. These results enable, for example, the transmission of a 1000-channel neural recording system sampled at 16 kHz with 16-bit resolution.