Ultra-High-Frequency Radio-Frequency-Identification Baseband Processor Design for Bio-Signal Acquisition and Wireless Transmission in Healthcare System

Healthcare systems have been an important part of the research on consumer electronics in recent years. To be a mass-market product, a healthcare system is combined with a home control system. In this article, an ultra-high-frequency radio-frequency-identification (UHF RFID) wireless interface is built and implemented for the bio-signal monitoring of the healthcare system. This interface is composed of a digital baseband processor with an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for the RFID reader and tag. All functions are implemented to fit the requirement of electronic product code class 1 generation 2 protocol, such as cyclic redundancy check/verify, pulse interval encoding, and bi-phase space coding. The system platform was built to obtain bio-signals, which can demonstrate the hand-shaking stage and communication between the reader and tag at the same time. The tag was fabricated under the 180-nm standard CMOS process with the average power consumption of only 73.62 μ W. The reader was implemented by a field programmable gate array in the system. The power consumption of the entire system combined with those in our previous works, which include analog front-end and radio-frequency front-end, is considered. It achieves 75 μ W, which is lower than those achieved with the existing state-of-the-art wireless interface. Moreover, the wearable device with ASICs is proposed to feature on relative low power and small size. Thus, it is more suitable for consumer electronics.