A 672-nW, 670-nVrms ECG Acquisition AFE With Noise-Tolerant Heartbeat Detector

This paper presents an electrocardiogram acquisition analog front-end (AFE) with a noise tolerant heartbeat (HB) detector. Source degradation and transconductance bootstrap techniques are incorporated into the AFE to reduce the 1/f noise of the amplifier. Furthermore, the chopper modulation, DC-servo loop (DSL) and pre-charge technology are combined to reduce interference from the environment. A mixed-signal implementation of HB detector with the symmetric-comparison loop is proposed to reduce the power consumption and area, which also suppresses motion artifact interference by adaptive thresholds. Implemented in 0.18 μm CMOS process, the circuit only occupies an area of 0.122 mm2 and consumes 0.62 μW at a 1.2-V supply, of which AFE and HB detector consume 507 nW and 110 nW, respectively. Simulation results show that the gain and the CMRR of AFE range from 30-45 dB and 65-105 dB, respectively. The input-referred noise is 670 nVrms with a mid-band gain of 42 dB and a bandwidth ranging from 0.5 Hz to 1 kHz.