Studies On Design of Near-Field Wireless-Powered Biphase Implantable Stimulators

Portable and implantable electronics are becoming increasingly important in the healthcare sector. One of the challenges is to guarantee stable systems for longer periods of time. If we consider applications such as electrical nerve stimulation or implanted ion pumps, the requirements for, e.g., levels, duration, etc., vary over time, and there may be a need to be able to remotely reconfigure devices, which in turn extends the life of the implant. This dissertation studies the efficient healthcare wireless network, wireless power supply, and its use in implantable biomedical systems. The body-area network (BAN) and near-field communication (NFC) are studied. Several Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) solutions are implemented, manufactured, and characterized. ASICs for portable and implantable sensors and actuators still have high research value. In addition, advances in flexible, implantable inductive coils, along with near-field energy harvesting technology, have driven the development of wireless, implantable devices. The ASICs are used to initiate and generate controlled signals that govern actuators in multiple locations in the body. Electronics specifications may include operations related to tissue-specific absorption rate, stimulation duration or levels to avoid tissue temperature rise, power transmission distance, and controlled current or voltage drivers. In this work, the feasibility of BAN as a healthcare network has been investigated. The functionality of an existing BodyCom communication system was expanded, sensors and actuators are added. The system enables data transfer between several sensor nodes placed on a human body. In BAN, the information is propagated along the skin in a capacitive, electric field. The network was demonstrated with a sensor node (stretchable glove) and implantable ion pump (actuator) for drug delivery. With the stretchable glove, movement patterns could be captured, and ions were delivered from a reservoir in the ion pump. Furthermore, NFC is studied, and the advantages of NFC compared to BAN are discussed. An ST Microelectronics system was used together with a planar coil developed on a flexible plastic substrate to demonstrate the concept. The efficiency between the primary and secondary coils is measured and characterized. A temperature sensor was chosen as the implantable sensor, and the signal strength at several distances between the primary and secondary inductive coils is characterized. The next phase of the work focuses on the implementation of ASICs. The first proposed system describes a wirelessly powered peripheral nerve stimulator. The system contains a full-wave rectifier-based energy harvester that operates at 13.56 MHz with the option to select a stimulation current. The stimulation current can be selected in the range of 15 nA up to 1 mA. A reference clock is extracted from the AC input and used to synchronize the data and generate the required control. In addition, a state machine is used to generate the time parameters required for cathodic and anodic nerve stimulation. The design is fabricated in the standard 180 nm CMOS process and is 0.22 mm2 large, excluding an integrated 3.6 nF capacitor. The chip is measured to verify the energy harvester, power cells, and timing control logic with an input amplitude |VAC | = 3 V and a load of 1 kΩ. Subsequently, a multichannel system was developed that makes it possible to dynamically set the biphase simulation profile. The amplitude modulated data packets transmitted through the inductively coupled interface are demodulated, and the information is extracted. The data stream is then used to generate control signals that activate the desired configuration (channel, stream, time, etc.).