An embryo towards an integrated circuit for body coupled communication

We are currently assembling the integrated circuit that will form the base analog front end (AFE) for our experiments on body-coupled communication (BCC). What we have found in our investigation of commercial vendors and our own hardware is that the sensitivity "out there" is too low. We need to further increase the accuracy of the main input amplifiers, both in terms of noise, but also tuneable bandwidth. We have concluded that we cannot do all the required changes on board level, and instead we have to go towards the integrated circuit.

The circuit will also offer a standardized serial control interface such that we can interact with the most common microcontrollers/protocols. We will be backwards compatible with our own prototypes and also compatible with some of the commercial vendors.