From 0.18µm to 28nm CMOS Down-scaling for Data Links in Body Dust Applications

In this work, we study the effect of transistor downscaling in a wireless communication circuit for Body Dust application. The system requires a chip lateral size smaller than 10 µm miming the typical size of a red blood cell and so, supporting free circulation in human tissues. Moreover, an ultralow-power architecture is needed since the system is battery-less and wirelessly powered via acoustic power transfer. The aim of this paper is to present a data communication system for Body Dust systems, which works from the multiplexed sensor read-out front-end to the transmitter back-end taking account diagnostic information on different metabolite concentrations in human body. This work shows that scaling the architecture from a 0.18-µm to 28-nm CMOS processes, it is possible to improve both size and power consumption. The improvement is about 40 times in size (2000 µm 2 down to 50 µm 2 ) and two order of magnitude in average power consumption (10 µW to cents of nW).