A 0.5V, 6.2μW, 0.059mm2 Sinusoidal Current Generator IC with 0.088% THD for Bio-Impedance Sensing

Abstract

This paper presents the first sub-10μW, sub-0.1% THD sinusoidal current generator (CG) IC that is capable of 20kHz output for the bio-impedance (Bio-Z) sensing applications. To benefit from the ultra-low-power nature of near-threshold operation, a 9b pseudo-sine LUT is 3b ΔΣ modulated in the digital domain, thus linearity burden of the DAC is avoided and only a 1.29μW of logic power is consumed, from a 0.5V supply and a 2.56MHz clock frequency. A half-period (HP) reset is introduced in the capacitive DAC, leading to around 30dB reduction of in-band noise by avoiding the sampling of data-dependent glitches and attenuating the kT/C noise and the non-idealities of reset switches (SW).