Self-Powered and Battery-Assisted CMOS Wireless Bio-Sensing IC Platform

A bio-sensing processor chip acts as an auto-configurable platform to support a wide variety of bio-sensors. Nano-wires with attached bio-receptors for specific bio-molecules, ECG, and SPO2 bio-sensors drive analog voltages or currents to analog inputs of the bio-sensing processor chip. These analog inputs are divided into three sections. An input sensor detector/decoder detects which analog inputs are active and configures an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to convert first-section inputs to 12 digital bits, second-section inputs to 16 bits, and third-section inputs to 20 bits. An Analog Front-End (AFE) is bypassed for the first section inputs but amplifies and filters second and third section inputs. A Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) sends the converted digital values to a nearby external device using NFC or WiFi transmitters. When no battery is detected, energy is harvested from NFC signals from the external device, and one-shot measurements are made.