A 4.4 nW lossless sensor data compression accelerator for 2.9x system power reduction in wireless body sensors

This paper presents a lossless sensor data compression accelerator for power reduction in wireless body sensors. First, a low complexity compression algorithm is demonstrated for the first time on electrocardiogram (ECG) and acceleration sensor data. Second, the algorithm is implemented as a custom hardware accelerator on a health monitoring driven System on Chip (SoC) in a 130 nm process. The accelerator is closely integrated with the transmitter interface to minimize its contribution to system power and reduce user overhead. The accelerator adds only 4.4 nW processing overhead and reduces the required transmitter duty cycle by 3.7x, reducing the system power by 2.9x, and allowing the entire system to consume just 2.62 μW when transmitting ECG data at a 360 Hz sampling rate.