A Sinusoidal Current Driver With an Extended Frequency Range and Multifrequency Operation for Bioimpedance Applications

This paper describes an alternative sinusoidal current driver suitable for bioimpedance applications where high frequency operation is required. The circuit is based on a transconductor and provides current outputs with low phase error for frequencies around its pole frequency. This extends the upper frequency operational limit of the current driver. Multifrequency currents can be generated where each individual frequency is phase corrected. Analysis of the circuit is presented together with simulation and experimental results which demonstrate the proof of concept for both single and dual frequency current drivers. Measurements on a discrete test version of the circuit demonstrate a phase reduction from 25 ^{\circ} to 4 ^{\circ} at 3 MHz for 2 mAp-p output current. The output impedance of the current driver is essentially constant at about 1.1 M \Omega over a frequency range of 100 kHz to 5 MHz due to the introduction of the phase compensation. The compensation provides a bandwidth increase of a factor of about six for a residual phase delay of 4 ^{\circ

Time-domain multitone impedance measurement system for space applications

© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper presents a time-domain methodology to measure the devices' live impedance at the frequency range between 30 Hz and 100 kHz. This measurement is a requirement for some space applications to ensure the stability between DC/DC converters and the onboard power. The methodology is based on a multitone excitation combined with current and voltage measurements performed with an oscilloscope. The experiments show that the measurement system obtains accurate results and offers new capabilities to deal with the drawbacks that traditional frequency-sweep instrumentation implies. The multitone approach injects signals at the entire frequency range simultaneously. Therefore, the measurement system is able to characterize time-varying and the nonlinear devices. The time-domain measurement system has been validated through different test cases achieving excellent results compared with the ones obtained using the reference impedance frequency-sweep approach.The project on which these results are based has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 801342 (TecniospringINDUSTRY) and the Government of Catalonia's Agency for Business Competitiveness (ACCIÓ). This work was supported by the Spanish “Agencia Estatal de Investigación” under project PID2019-106120RBC31/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Energy-Efficient PRBS Impedance Spectroscopy on a Digital Versatile Platform

partially_open6siThis research has been partially funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) through the program “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza” (2018-2022). The research has also received partial support from the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) and the Eranet FLAG ERA initiative within CONVERGENCE project (CUP B84I16000030005) through the IUNET Consortium.This paper presents the digital design of a versatile and low-power broadband impedance spectroscopy (IS) system based on pseudo-random binary sequence (PRBS) excitation. The PRBS technique allows fast, and low-power estimation of the impedance spectrum over a wide bandwidth with adequate accuracy, proving to be a good candidate for portable medical devices, especially. This paper covers the low-power design of the firmware algorithms and implements them on a versatile and reconfigurable digital platform that can be easily adjusted to the specific application. It will analyze the digital platform with the aim of reducing power consumption while maintaining adequate accuracy of the estimated spectrum. The paper studies two main algorithms (time-domain and frequency-domain) used for PRBS-based IS and implements both of them on the ultra-low-power GAP-8 digital platform. They are compared in terms of accuracy, measurement time, and power budget, while general design trade-offs are drawn out. The time-domain algorithm demonstrated the best accuracy while the frequency-domain one contributes more to save power and energy. However, analysis of the energy-per-error FOM revealed that the time-domain algorithm outperforms the frequency-domain algorithm offering better accuracy for the same energy consumption. Numerical methods and microprocessor resources are exploited to optimize the implementation of both algorithms achieving 27 ms in processing time, power consumption as low as 1.4 mW and a minimum energy consumption per measurement of 0.5 mJ, for a dense impedance spectrum estimation of 214 points.embargoed_20210525Luciani G.; Crescentini M.; Romani A.; Chiani M.; Benini L.; Tartagni M.Luciani G.; Crescentini M.; Romani A.; Chiani M.; Benini L.; Tartagni M

Development of real-time cellular impedance analysis system

The cell impedance analysis technique is a label-free, non-invasive method, which simplifies sample preparation and allows applications requiring unmodified cell retrieval. However, traditional impedance measurement methods suffer from various problems (speed, bandwidth, accuracy) for extracting the cellular impedance information. This thesis proposes an improved system for extracting precise cellular impedance in real-time, with a wide bandwidth and satisfactory accuracy. The system hardware consists of five main parts: a microelectrode array (MEA), a stimulation circuit, a sensing circuit, a multi-function card and a computer. The development of system hardware is explored. Accordingly, a novel bioimpedance measurement method coined digital auto balancing bridge method, which is improved from the traditional analogue auto balancing bridge circuitry, is realized for real-time cellular impedance measurement. Two different digital bridge balancing algorithms are proposed and realized, which are based on least mean squares (LMS) algorithm and fast block LMS (FBLMS) algorithm for single- and multi-frequency measurements respectively. Details on their implementation in FPGA are discussed. The test results prove that the LMS-based algorithm is suitable for accelerating the measurement speed in single-frequency situation, whilst the FBLMS-based algorithm has advantages in stable convergence in multi-frequency applications. A novel algorithm, called the All Phase Fast Fourier Transform (APFFT), is applied for post-processing of bioimpedance measurement results. Compared with the classical FFT algorithm, the APFFT significantly reduces spectral leakage caused by truncation error. Compared to the traditional FFT and Digital Quadrature Demodulation (DQD) methods, the APFFT shows excellent performance for extracting accurate phase and amplitude in the frequency spectrum. Additionally, testing and evaluation of the realized system has been performed. The results show that our system achieved a satisfactory accuracy within a wide bandwidth, a fast measurement speed and a good repeatability. Furthermore, our system is compared with a commercial impedance analyzer (Agilent 4294A) in biological experiments. The results reveal that our system achieved a comparable accuracy to the commercial instrument in the biological experiments. Finally, conclusions are given and the future work is proposed

A Goertzel Filter Based System for Fast Simultaneous Multi-Frequency EIS

Bioimpedance measurement is a non-invasive, radiation-free, and inexpensive method for measuring the electrical properties of biological tissues. In applications where transients occur, the commonly used swept sinewave is replaced with broadband signals such as multisine. This makes the signal generation and the extraction of the real and imaginary parts of the impedance challenging. In this brief, an alternative to traditional fast Fourier transform (FFT) or coherent demodulation is presented. Based on the Goertzel filter, this alternative is simpler and requires very few digital resources. Its robustness to the harmonic fold back phenomenon, enables simple ternary current pulses to be used for excitation. The developed digital architecture is capable of simultaneous demodulation of 16 frequencies with an accuracy of 97% and 96% on the magnitude and phase measurement respectively. Employing a ternary sequence allows the use of a low power H-bridge current driver. The analog front-end and demodulation algorithm were implemented in an ASIC using a 180-nm CMOS technology. The system was tested on an isolated pig heart distinguishing edema from non-edema tissue by impedance changes

Current source enhancements in Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) to cancel unwanted capacitive effects

Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) has emerged as a non-invasive imaging modality to detect and quantify functional or electrical properties related to the suspicious tumors in cancer screening, diagnosis and prognosis assessment. A constraint on EIS systems is that the current excitation system suffers from the effects of stray capacitance having a major impact on the hardware subsystem as the EIS is an ill-posed inverse problem which depends on the noise level in EIS measured data and regularization parameter in the reconstruction algorithm. There is high complexity in the design of stable current sources, with stray capacitance reducing the output impedance and bandwidth of the system. To confront this, we have designed an EIS current source which eliminates the effect of stray capacitance and other impacts of the capacitance via a variable inductance. In this paper, we present a combination of operational CCII based on a generalized impedance converter (OCCII-GIC) with a current source. The aim of this study is to use the EIS system as a biomedical imaging technique, which is effective in the early detection of breast cancer. This article begins with the theoretical description of the EIS structure, current source topologies and proposes a current conveyor in application of a Gyrator to eliminate the current source limitations and its development followed by simulation and experimental results. We demonstrated that the new design could achieve a high output impedance over a 3MHz frequency bandwidth when compared to other types of GIC circuits combined with an improved Howland topology

Multifrequency simultaneous bioimpedance measurements using multitone burst signals for dynamic tissue characterization

In this paper we present the keypoints to perform multifrequency simultaneous bioimpedance measurements using multitone signals. Concerning the frequency distribution, tones are spread over 1kHz to 1MHz range using a custom frequency distribution which we called Bilateral Quasi Logarithmic (BQL). BQL concentrates a higher number of tones around the impedance relaxation and contains a frequency plan algorithm. It minimizes the intermodulation effects due to non-linearities behaviours of the DUT and electrodes by slightly shifting the original tones in order to guarantee a guard bandwith. Regarding the multitone phase distribution, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) has been developed to minimize multitone Crest Factor (CF). This allow us to maximize the resultant Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of the acquisition system. This paper also presents the relation between parameters such as sampling frequency and ADC bits with the SNR and the effect in the overall amplitude and phase error when using multitone signals as excitation waveforms. Finally, we present characterization results from a measurement system based on a modular PXI architecture.Postprint (published version

Electrical Impedance Tomography for Biomedical Applications: Circuits and Systems Review

There has been considerable interest in electrical impedance tomography (EIT) to provide low-cost, radiation-free, real-time and wearable means for physiological status monitoring. To be competitive with other well-established imaging modalities, it is important to understand the requirements of the specific application and determine a suitable system design. This paper presents an overview of EIT circuits and systems including architectures, current drivers, analog front-end and demodulation circuits, with emphasis on integrated circuit implementations. Commonly used circuit topologies are detailed, and tradeoffs are discussed to aid in choosing an appropriate design based on the application and system priorities. The paper also describes a number of integrated EIT systems for biomedical applications, as well as discussing current challenges and possible future directions

An Integrated Analog Readout for Multi-Frequency Bioimpedance Measurements

Bioimpedance spectroscopy is used in a wide range of biomedical applications. This paper presents an integrated analog readout, which employs synchronous detection to perform galvanostatic multi-channel, multi-frequency bioimpedance measurements. The circuit was fabricated in a 0.35-μm CMOS technology and occupies an area of 1.52 mm2. The effect of random dc offsets is investigated, along with the use of chopping to minimize them. Impedance measurements of a known RC load and skin (using commercially available electrodes) demonstrate the operation of the system over a frequency range up to 1 MHz. The circuit operates from a ±2.5 V power supply and has a power consumption of 3.4-mW per channel