Wireless Multi-Channel Quasi-Digital Tactile Sensing Glove-Based System

The design of a wireless data-glove is introduced in this paper; the aim is to provide an effective and complete solution wherever a tactile sensing system has to be integrated to correctly interact with the surrounding environment (e.g., astronaut's extravehicular activity glove). The focus is on the design of the whole system, starting with the readout circuit, the digital signal encoding and ending with the data transmission. The system is made of eight quasi-digital readout circuits to convert the analog information into a pulse-density modulation. The pulse streams are then temporally ordered to form a single streams of events. By integrating a Impulse Radio Ultra-Wide Band (IR-UWB) transmitter and choosing the proper protocol and modulation, we can aim to minimize the power consumption and provide error detection; the design has also taken into account the minimization of the complexity of the receiver. The whole system, fully asynchronous, has been designed as a single full-custom chip; besides having multiple independent inputs, it can be configured both to deploy a multi-chip system (with a single receiver) and to optimize wireless transmission parameters.