Design of Building Blocks in Digital Baseband Transceivers for Body-Coupled Communication

Abstract: Advances in communication technologies continue to increase information sharing among the people.~Short-range wireless networking technologies such as Bluetooth or ZigBee, which are mainly used for data transfer over short range, will, however, suffer from network congestion, high power consumption and security issues in the future. The body-coupled communication (BCC), a futuristic short-range wireless technology, uses the human body as a transmission medium. In BBC channel, a small electric field is induced onto the human body which enables the propagation of a signal between communication devices that are in the proximity or direct contact with the human body. The direct baseband transmission and simple architecture make BCC an attractive candidate for a future short-range wireless communication technology in particular applications such as body area network. The main focus of this thesis is on the design and implementation of digital baseband transmitter and receiver for the body-coupled communication. The physical layer (PHY) implementation of the digital baseband transmitter and receiver is inspired from the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet transmission protocol. The digital design is implemented at RTL level using hardware description language (VHDL). The functionality of the digital baseband transmitter and receiver is demonstrated by developing data transfer application layers.