A 415 nW Physically and Mathematically Secure Electro-Quasistatic HBC Node in 65nm CMOS for Authentication and Medical Applications

Abstract

Applications such as secure authentication, remote health monitoring require secure, low power communication between devices around the body. Radio wave communication protocols, such as Bluetooth, suffer from the problem of signal leakage and high power requirement. Electro QuasiStatic Human Body Communication (EQS-UBC) is the ideal alternative as it confines the signal within the body and also operates at order of magnitude lower power. In this paper, we design a secure HBC SoC node, which uses EQS-UBC for physical security and an AES-256 core for mathematical security. The SoC consumes 415nW power with an active power of 108nW for a data rate of 1kbps, sufficient for authentication and remote monitoring applications. This translates to 100x improvement in power consumption compared to state-of-the-art HBC implementations while providing physical security for the first time.