A monolithic integrated low-voltage deep brain stimulator with wireless power and data transmission**Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61404043, 61401137), the Key Laboratory of Infrared Imaging Materials and Detectors, Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nos. IIMDKFJJ-13-06, IIMDKFJJ-14-03), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2015HGZX0026).

Abstract

A monolithic integrated low-voltage deep brain stimulator with wireless power and data transmission is presented. Data and power are transmitted to the stimulator by mutual inductance coupling, while the in-vitro controller encodes the stimulation parameters. The stimulator integrates the digital control module and can generate the bipolar current with equal amplitude in four channels. In order to reduce power consumption, a novel controlled threshold voltage cancellation rectifier is proposed in this paper to provide the supply voltage of the stimulator. The monolithic stimulator was fabricated in a SMIC 0.18 μm 1-poly 6-metal mixed-signal CMOS process, occupying 0.23 mm2, and consumes 180 μW on average. Compared with previously published stimulators, this design has advantages of large stimulated current (0–0.8 mA) with the double low-voltage supply (1.8 and 3.3 V), and high-level integration.