Jihoon Lee (master’s graduate), Jaehyun Ko (PhD student), Iksu Jang (PhD student), and their advisor, Professor Byungsub Kim, of POSTECH’s Department of Electrical Engineering received an Outstanding Conference Paper Award at the 2020 Fall Conference hosted by the Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences (KICS). Their paper, “Review: Human Body Communication Using Decision Feedback Equalisation” (Jihoon Lee and seven coauthors), was recognized for its excellence.

The paper addressed the world’s first application of decision feedback equalisation (DFE) to human body communication. By characterizing and analyzing the single-bit pulse response of the human body channel, the researchers showed that DFE is effective for this channel. Based on this analysis, they fabricated an inverter-based transmitter and an eight-tap DFE receiver using a 65 nm CMOS process.

The proposed DFE-based human body channel transceiver achieved data rates of 150 Mb/s over 20 cm and 100 Mb/s over 100 cm. These experiments verified that DFE-based communication can substantially increase communication speed through the human body channel.

Broadband Electronics by Virtual Intelligence (BEVIL Lab) @ POSTECH