This thesis presents advances in integrated circuit techniques for two biomedical system architectures; the first is radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) for the MICS band, and the second is time-of-flight (TOF) positron emission tomography (PET). These two systems can be inherently combined.
Radio frequency circuits have been progressively incorporated in the daily life of people all over the world. Different generations of mobile communication technologies have been developed to provide increasingly higher data rates. On the other hand, wireless communications for wireless body area networks (WBAN) mostly focus on low power consumption, while high data rates are attractive to achieve low transmission energy. The front-ends for WBAN are increasingly required in many medical, portable, as well as in implantable devices. The ISM band of 402MHz (Medical Implant Communications Service - MICS) has been allocated for the operation of these low power devices. A current-reuse receiver front-end including LNA and mixer which operate at the RF frequency spanning from 402 to 405 MHz has been manufactured using a TSMC 0.18 um CMOS process. The contributions of this receiver compared with previous architectures are improved receiver NF, sensitivity, and power consumption with values of 13.2 dB, -95.6 dBm, and 1.3 mW, respectively. Moreover, previous works have relied on ASK and FSK as main stream modulation schemes with limited efficiency and data rates of 200 kbps. Using QPSK modulation, the proposed receiver achieves a data rate of 446 kbps which is realized within 300 kHz of channel bandwidth; thus, by improving the data rate, energy efficiency improves as well.
The low power RF receivers for biomedical applications in this thesis can be applied directly to the data link between a PC and the second IC architecture presented in this thesis, which is a positron emission tomography (PET) front-end IC.
Advances on integrated circuit design for the medical the medical imaging technique of Positron-Emission-Tomography has conventionally mainly relied on the field-of-interaction imaging technique to reconstruct positron events generated by gamma rays inside of a PET camera. In order to improve the spatial resolution of PET cameras the time-of-flight (TOF) technique has been investigated recently worldwide.
TOF requires the front-end of the PET camera to operate at higher frequencies compared with conventional architectures. This work presents the design considerations as well as the integrated circuit (IC) silicon implementation of a TOF front-end and its measurement results for a PET camera. The front-end has been manufactured using a TSMC 90 nm CMOS process. Moreover, the proposed IC utilizes a digital-to-analog converter DAC to calibrate the comparators inside of the PET IC in order to improve timing resolution. Another technique to improve the PET circuit performance compared with previous architectures is the technique of bias stabilization, which has been implemented using adaptive bias. In this thesis, we propose a mathematical noise model for the design of PET front-ends that has not been presented previously. The PET IC with a silicon area of 3.3 x 2.7 mm2 and power consumption of 2.5 mW per channel has been tested using a Cyclone IV FPGA environment. By using the proposed mathematical model the IC performance in terms of timing resolution can be described with enough accuracy so that outperforms previous IC architectures; the achieved timing resolution using a laser setup is 181.5 ps full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM) with an intrinsic timing resolution of 9.71 ps root-mean-square (RMS).

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