Imec and Holst Centre develop low-power ECG-acquisition chip
The organisations demonstrated the chip at ISSCC2014. It signals an important achievement in enabling implantable cardiac monitoring solutions
At this week's International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC2014), imec and Holst Centre, together with Olympus, demonstrated a low-power single channel implantable electrocardiography (ECG) acquisition chip with analogue feature extraction.
The device enables precise monitoring of the signal activity in a selected frequency band.
Leadless compact Pacemakers with ultra-low power consumption are emerging, improving analysis and clinical research of the intra-cardiac rhythm, and as a result, improving patients' quality of life.
The new low-power ECG acquisition chip advances the state-of-the-art by consuming only 680 nA when all features are active, and also provides competitive performance, such as input SNR over 70dB, CMRR greater than 90dB, PSRR over 80dB without any external passive components.
By equipping an ultra-low power analogue feature extractor, the new chip is capable of assisting digital signal processor platforms for the implementation of low-power heartbeat detection algorithms.
Imec's portfolio on integrated circuits for implantable cardiac monitoring applications is available for licensing. It also includes a low-power ASIC for intra-cardiac ventricular fibrillation detection, featuring best-in-class three low-power cardiac signal readout channel, one bio-impedance measurement channel, and low-latency beat detection feature, all with 20µW power dissipation (ISSCC2013).
