A Silicon-Based Radio Platform for Integrated Edge Sensing and Communication Toward Sustainable Healthcare

Faced with COVID-19 and the trend of aging, it is demanding to develop an online health metrics sensing solution for sustainable healthcare. An edge radio platform owning the function of integrated sensing and communications is promising to address the challenge. Radar demonstrates the capability for noncontact healthcare with high sensitivity and excellent privacy protection. Beyond conventional radar, this article presents a unique silicon-based radio platform for health status monitoring supported by coherent frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar at Ku-band and communication chip. The radar chip is fabricated by a 65-nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process and demonstrates a 1.5-GHz chirp bandwidth with a 15-GHz center frequency in 220-mW power consumption. A specific small-volume antenna with modified Vivaldi architecture is utilized for emitting and receiving radar beams. Biomedical experiments were implemented based on the radio platform cooperating with the antenna and system-on-chip (SoC) field-programmable gate array (FPGA) edge unit. An industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM)-band frequency-shift keying (FSK) communication chip in 915-MHz center frequency with microwatt-level power consumption is used to attain communications on radar-detected health information. Through unified integration of radar chip, management software, and communication unit, the integrated radio platform featuring -72-dBm sensitivity with a 500-kb/s FSK data rate is exploited to drastically empower sustainable healthcare applications.