A Fully-Differential CMOS Instrumentation Amplifier for Bioimpedance-Based IoT Medical Devices

Abstract

The implementation of a fully-differential (FD) instrumentation amplifier (IA), based on indirect current feedback (ICF) and aimed to electrical impedance measurements in an Internet of Things (IoT) biomedical scenario, is presented. The IA consists of two FD transconductors, to process the input signal and feed back the output signal, a summing stage, used to add both contributions and generate the correcting current feedback signal, and a common-mode feedback network, which controls the DC level at the output nodes of the circuit. The transconductors are formed by a voltage-to-current conversion resistor and two voltage buffers, which are based on a super source follower cell in order to improve the overall response of the circuit. As a result, a compact single-stage structure, suitable for achieving a high bandwidth and a low power consumption, is obtained. The FD ICF IA has been designed and fabricated in 180 nm CMOS technology to operate with a 1.8-V supply and provide a nominal gain of 4 V/V. Experimental results show a voltage gain of 3.78 ± 0.06 V/V, a BW of 5.83 MHz, a CMRR at DC around 70 dB, a DC current consumption of 266.4 μA and a silicon area occupation of 0.0304 mm2.