Magnetoelectric Bio-Implants Powered and Programmed by a Single Transmitter for Coordinated Multisite Stimulation
Abstract
This article presents a hardware platform including stimulating implants wirelessly powered and controlled by a shared transmitter (TX) for coordinated leadless multisite stimulation. The adopted novel single-TX, multiple-implant structure can flexibly deploy stimuli, improve system efficiency, easily scale stimulating channel quantity, and relieve efforts in device synchronization. In the proposed system, a wireless link leveraging magnetoelectric (ME) effect is co-designed with a robust and efficient system-on-chip (SoC) to enable reliable operation and individual programming of every implant. Each implant integrates a 0.8-mm² chip, a 6-mm² ME film, and an energy storage capacitor within a 6.2-mm³ size. ME power transfer is capable of safely transmitting milliwatt power to devices placed several centimeters away from the TX coil, maintaining good efficiency with size constraints, and tolerating 60°, 1.5-cm misalignment in angular and lateral movement. The SoC robustly operates with 2-V source amplitude variations that spans a 40-mm TX-implant distance change, realizes individual addressability through physical unclonable function (PUF) IDs, and achieves 90% efficiency for 1.5-3.5-V stimulation with fully programmable stimulation parameters.
Zhanghao Yu
PhD 2023, now at Intel
Yan He
PhD 2023, now at Nvidia
