A 4.9 mΩ-Sensitivity Mobile Electrical Impedance Tomography IC for Early Breast-Cancer Detection System

Abstract

A mobile electrical impedance tomography (EIT) IC is proposed for early breast cancer detection personally at home. To assemble the entire system into a simple brassiere shape, EIT IC is integrated via a multi-layered fabric circuit board which includes 90 EIT electrodes and two reference electrodes for current stimulation and voltage sensing. The IC supports three operating modes; gain scanning, contact impedance monitoring, and EIT modes for the clear EIT image. A differential sinusoidal current stimulator (DSCS) is proposed for injection of low-distortion programmable current which has harmonics less than -59 dBc at a load impedance of 2 kΩ. To get high sensitivity, a 6-channel voltage sensing amplifier can adaptively control the gain up to a maximum of 60 dB, and has low input referred noise, 36 nV/ √Hz. The 2.5 × 5 mm chip is fabricated in a 0.18 μm 1P6M CMOS process and consumes 53.4 mW on average. As a result, a sensitivity of 4.9 mΩ is achieved which enables the detection of a 5 mm cancer mass within an agar test phantom.