The wireless body area network (WBAN) has gained significant attention over the past few decades due to its ability to offer seamless and real-time healthcare and fitness monitoring, allowing patients to go about their daily activities without any constraints.

Designing high radiation efficiency antennas for wearable devices presents a challenge due to the close proximity to the human body, which causes loading effects due to the lossy nature of body tissues. Additionally, the demand for lightweight, low-cost, maintenance-free, and easy-to-install antennas further complicates the design process.

Firstly, a compact QMSIW antenna with a proposed bandwidth enhancement technique is presented, and this technique broaden the bandwidth by 108% as compared to conventional SIW structure. The mea...[ Read more ]

The wireless body area network (WBAN) has gained significant attention over the past few decades due to its ability to offer seamless and real-time healthcare and fitness monitoring, allowing patients to go about their daily activities without any constraints.

Designing high radiation efficiency antennas for wearable devices presents a challenge due to the close proximity to the human body, which causes loading effects due to the lossy nature of body tissues. Additionally, the demand for lightweight, low-cost, maintenance-free, and easy-to-install antennas further complicates the design process.

Firstly, a compact QMSIW antenna with a proposed bandwidth enhancement technique is presented, and this technique broaden the bandwidth by 108% as compared to conventional SIW structure. The measured on/off-body channel with the designed antenna provides usable experimental data for link budget estimation in transceiver system design.

Secondly, a new zero-IF PTRX that incorporates a passive four-stage cascading double balanced sub-harmonic mixer for phase detection is proposed. This architecture can effectively address the phase-pulling issue resulting from interference and on-chip coupling, and meanwhile minimize the power consumption of the VCO. Additionally, a 4-stage differential ring oscillator with 8 phases for sub-harmonic operation and a low-power inductor-less low noise amplifier (LNA) are incorporated to minimize the active die area.