🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the lack of efficient, wiring-free co-transmission mechanisms for power and data among batteryless distributed wearable modules by proposing the first carrier-free fabric-based co-transmission architecture leveraging UART signaling. The approach employs a transmission line formed by two conductive fabric layers separated by an insulating layer, enabling direct AC-coupled injection of UART pulses to simultaneously deliver DC power and data without carrier modulation. Signal recovery is achieved via a comparator informed by a second-order circuit transient response model, and an analytical framework is established to assess the feasibility of data rates, fabric parameters, and decoupling inductor design. Experimental results demonstrate successful high-bit-rate synchronous transmission of both power and data over conductive fabrics, offering a low-overhead interconnect foundation for wearable systems.
📝 Abstract
This brief presents a conductive-textile interconnection scheme for batteryless distributed wearable modules. Two conductive textile layers separated by an insulating fabric layer are used as a transmission line that simultaneously conveys DC power and pulse-based data signals without point-to-point wiring. To minimize the circuit overhead of each module, universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART) pulses are directly coupled onto the textile through AC-coupling capacitors without carrier modulation. The textile waveform is modeled as the transient response of a second-order circuit, and design conditions for comparator-based waveform recovery and high-bitrate transmission are analytically derived. The resulting design framework determines whether a given combination of data rate, textile capacitance and resistance is feasible, and also provides the corresponding design range of the decoupling inductors. These results establish a basic methodology for textile-based simultaneous power and data transfer.