An ECG-on-Chip with 535-nW/Channel Integrated Lossless Data Compressor for Wireless Sensors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-power, integrated lossless ECG data compressor on a chip, significantly reducing data size for wireless ECG sensors while maintaining minimal power consumption and small size.

Contribution

It presents a novel low-complexity lossless ECG compression technique integrated on a chip, achieving high compression ratio with ultra-low power for wearable applications.

Findings

Achieves 2.25x average compression ratio on MIT/BIH ECG database.

Consumes only 535 nW per channel at 2.4 V for four channels.

Occupies 0.4 mm² in 0.35 um process.

Abstract

This paper presents a low-power ECG recording system-on-chip (SoC) with on-chip low-complexity lossless ECG compression for data reduction in wireless/ambulatory ECG sensor devices. The chip uses a linear slope predictor for data compression, and incorporates a novel low-complexity dynamic coding-packaging scheme to frame the prediction error into fixed-length 16-bit format. The proposed technique achieves an average compression ratio of 2.25x on MIT/BIH ECG database. Implemented in a standard 0.35 um process, the compressor uses 0.565K gates/channel occupying 0.4 mm2 for four channels, and consumes 535 nW/channel at 2.4 V for ECG sampled at 512 Hz. Small size and ultra-low power consumption makes the proposed technique suitable for wearable ECG sensor applications.