A 400 mV 160 nW/Ch Compact Energy Efficient ∆Σ Modulator for Multichannel Biopotential Signal Acquisition System

Analog to digitalconverter circuit design for biomedical systems with multiple recording channels presents challenges in high density and very low power consumption. Passive integrator and loop-filter based delta-sigma modulators (DSMs) have been recently reported for ultra-low-power and highly energy-efficient data converters for multi-channel biopotential acquisition. However, these modulators rely on a very high oversampling ratio (OSR) to achieve the target resolution. Higher OSR leads to higher power consumption in the modulator and the digital low-pass and decimation filter succeeding the DSM. We present a low OSR passive integrator-based DSM in this work by relying on a duty-cycled resistor (DCR). DCR enables the realization of large time constants in the already passive loop-filter, with minimal area and overhead power consumption. This leads to design of DSMs that are highly area, power and energy-efficient, suitable for multi-channel biopotential recording systems. We demonstrate a second order, duty-cycled passive integrator based CTDSM in a 65 nm CMOS technology for a 10 kHz biopotential bandwidth. Measurement results show that the fabricated design achieves an SNDR/DR of 56.36/63.1 dB while consuming only 160 nW power with an OSR of 32 and occupies an area of 0.035 mm ² with a state-of-the-art energy efficiency of 14.9 fJ/conv. In-vitro and in-vivo measurements are provided to further demonstrate the operation of the proposed DSM.