Abstract
This paper reports on a pulsed coding technique based on optical Ultra-wideband (UWB) modulation for wireless implantable biotelemetry systems allowing for high data rate link whilst enabling significant power reduction compared to the state-of-the-art. This optical data coding approach is suitable for emerging biomedical applications like transcutaneous neural wireless communication systems. The overall architecture implementing this optical modulation technique employs sub-nanosecond pulsed laser as the data transmitter and small sensitive area photodiode as the data receiver. Moreover, it includes coding and decoding digital systems, biasing and driving analogue circuits for laser pulse generation and photodiode signal conditioning. The complete system has been implemented on Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and prototype Printed Circuit Board (PCB) with discrete off-the-shelf components. By inserting a diffuser between the transmitter and the receiver to emulate skin/tissue, the system is capable to achieve a 128 Mbps data rate with a bit error rate less than 10−9 and an estimated total power consumption of about 5 mW corresponding to a power efficiency of 35.9 pJ/bit. These results could allow, for example, the transmission of an 800-channel neural recording interface sampled at 16 kHz with 10-bit resolution.
Highlights
Emerging implantable biomedical systems need to transmit large amounts of data through skin/tissue to achieve high accuracy measurements, high dimensionality and real-time control of complex prosthetic devices like brain machine interfaces [1,2,3]
Experimental measurements were performed with the implemented overall system operating at different data rates up to 128 Mbps employing a Pseudo-Random Bit Sequence (PRBS) of length 231 -1 generated by the Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board with an average number of pulses transmitted for each bit equal to 1.5 pulses/bit
The transmission channel could be considered as a “noisy channel” and the Bit Error Rate (BER) has been directly evaluated through experimental measurements since it depends on the channel condition mainly related to the employed diffuser
Summary
Emerging implantable biomedical systems need to transmit large amounts of data through skin/tissue to achieve high accuracy measurements, high dimensionality and real-time control of complex prosthetic devices like brain machine interfaces [1,2,3] These systems require wireless biotelemetry links with high data rate, reduced power consumption, small Bit Error Rate (BER). Optical biotelemetry links, employing semiconductor modulated/pulsed lasers as data transmitters and photodiodes as data receivers, allow the performances of the RF-based systems to be enhanced [4,14,15,16,17] In these regards, further improvements have been obtained by increasing the laser power and by using On-Off Keying (OOK) based modulations and large sensitive area photodiodes.
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