Titled “A small fully digital open-loop clock and data recovery circuit for wired BANs”, this paper addresses the communication between nodes of a BAN (Body-Area Network) in clinical environments. BANs are composed of nodes which contain sensors placed near, on or inside the body. These nodes communicate amongst themselves to get the information to a central node, which is then sent to a computer for further processing and analysis.

For the BANs considered in the paper, the nodes are embedded in garments and interconnected by conductive yarns. The goal of the BAN is to acquire information on the lower limbs during movement, namely position, speed and acceleration, and electromyography signals (recording the electrical activity produced by the muscles when they are contracted or relaxed).

In this type of network it is important to assure an effective communication between nodes, and for that reason it is necessary to guarantee that the transmitters and the receivers are synchronised. The paper proposes a digital circuit that that ensures synchronisation with very low overhead and analyses its performance based on fabricated integrated circuits.

This solution is advantageous due to its low complexity (small area, high energy efficiency), rapid synchronisation, and ability to work at high information transmission rates for this application domain (35x10^6 bit/second).

This work was supported by an FCT PhD scholarship (SFRH/BD/75324/201) for Fardin Derogarian, and was partially developed as part of project Prolimb (FCT). The paper was published in the International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications.

CTM/INESC TEC, July 2015