A Study On Reliable High-Speed HBC Enhanced by ECC for Wearable Neural Interfaces

This work reports the first quantitative study about reliable high-speed human body communication (HBC) enhanced by error correction code (ECC) for wearable neural interfaces. For the first time, Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocqunghem (BCH) code was applied to the measured raw data of an HBC transceiver (TRX) that operated at about 100 Mb/s or faster to quantitatively assess the reliability improvement and the additional power and area cost associated with the BCH code. In our assessments, the (136, 128, 1) BCH code very efficiently improved the reliability of the HBC as it improved the eye height by up to about 95 % at costs of only 5-7% additional power and 46% additional silicon area. With slightly more power consumption up to 21% and 90% chip area, the (160, 128, 4) BCH code greatly improved the reliability of the HBC as it increased the eye height by up to 200%.