Body-channel communication (BCC) is based on the principle of electrical field data transmission attributable to capacitive coupling through the human body. It is gaining importance now a day in the scenario of human centric communication because it truly offers a natural means of interaction with the human body. Traditionally, near field communication (NFC) considers as a magnetic field coupling based on radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The RFID technology also limits the definition of NFC and thus reduces the scope of a wide range of applications. In recent years BCC, after its first origin in 1995, regain importance with its valuable application in biomedical systems. Primarily, KAIST and Philips research groups demonstrate BCC in the context of biomedical remote patient health monitoring system. BCC transceiver mainly consists of two parts: one is digital baseband and the other is an analog front end (AFE). In this thesis, an analog front end receiver has presented to support the overall BCC. The receiver (Rx) architecture consists of cascaded preamplifier and Schmitt trigger. When the signals are coming from the human body, they are attenuated around 60 dB and gives weak signals in the range of mV. A high gain preamplifier stage needs to amplify these weak signals and make them as strong signals. The preamplifier single stage needs to cascade for the gain requirement. The single stage preamplifier, which is designed with ST65 nm technology, has an open loop gain of 24.01 dB and close loop gain of 19.43 dB. A flipped voltage follower (FVF) topology is used for designing this preamplifier to support the low supply voltage of 1 V because the topology supports low voltage, low noise and also low power consumption. The input-referred noise is 8.69 nV/sqrt(Hz) and the SNR at the input are 73.26 dB. The Schmitt trigger (comparator with hysteresis) is a bistable positive feedback circuit. It builds around two stage OTA with lead frequency compensation. The DC gain for this OTA is 26.94 dB with 1 V supply voltage. The corner analyzes and eye diagram as a performance matrix for the overall receiver are also included in this thesis work.

Capacitive communication using human body as a electrical channel has attracted much attention in the area of personal area networks (PANs) since its introduction by Zimmerman in 1995. The reason being that the personal information and communication appliances are becoming an integral part of our daily lives. The advancement in technology is also helping a great deal in making them interesting,useful and very much affordable. If we interconnect these body-based devices with capacitive communication approach in a manner appropriate to the power, size, cost and functionality, it lessens the burden of supporting a communication channel by existing wired and wireless technologies. More than that, using body as physical communication channel for a PAN device compared to traditional radio transmission seems to have a lot of inherent advantages in terms of power and security etc. But still a lot of feasibility and reliability issues have to be addressed before it is ready for prime time. This promising technology is recently sub-classified into body area networks (BAN) and is currently under discussion in the IEEE 802.15.6 Task Group for addressing the technical requirements to unleash its full potential for BANs. This could play a part in Ericsson's envision of  50 billion connections by 2020. This thesis work is part of the main project to investigate the models, interface and derive requirements on the analog-front-end (AFE) required for the system. Also to suggest a first order model of the AFE that suits this communication system.In this thesis work the human body is modeled along with interfaces and transceiver to reflect the true condition of the system functioning. Various requirements like sensitivity, dynamic range, noise figure and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) requirements are derived based on the system model. An AFE model based on discrete components is simulated, which was later used for proof of concept. Also a first order AFE model is developed based on the requirements derived. The AFE model is simulated under the assumed interference and noise conditions. The first order requirements for the submodules of the AFE are also derived. Future work and challenges are discussed.