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A 2 MHz Wireless CMOS Transceiver for Implantable Biosignal Sensing Systems

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Abstract

An implementation of an implantable sensing biosystem composes of a readout circuit, a power management block, an embedded microcontroller unit (MCU), an implantable drug delivery section and a wireless uplink transceiver system. This paper describes a bi-directional wireless transceiver system for implantable sensing systems. The transceiver system is composed of an external and implantable transceiver, communicating through an inductive link. Half duplex communication between transceivers at a 10 Kbps data rate was achieved at a maximum distance of 4 cm. Command and data will be supplied to the implantable module by radio frequency (RF) telemetry utilizing an amplitude shift keying (ASK) modulated 2 MHz carrier frequency. A capacitor-less amplitude demodulation receiver architecture was produced in the research with implantable receiver core area measuring at 113.2 µm by 171.8 µm with average power dissipation at 815.1 µW at a 3.3 V single rail power supply. An active uplink transceiver utilizing load shift keying (LSK) as backward data telemetry was designed. Implantable transmitter core area measures 251.7 µm by 139.3 µm, consuming 103.62 mW while driving an RF ferrite core antenna at maximum reading range. Integrating both circuits, implantable transceiver, measuring 355.3 µm by 171.8 µm, was designed and implemented using TSMC 0.35 µm mixed-signal 2P4M 3.3 V standard CMOS process. The integrated circuit solution addressed solutions for many of the problems associated with implanted devices and introduces circuits which improve in several ways over previously published designs, in functionality and integration level. In addition to being fully integrated in plain CMOS technology, not relying at least partly on available specialized elements and expensive technologies, these building blocks improve on previous designs in performance and/or power consumption. This work succeeded in implementing building blocks for an implantable transceiver, which depends only on the absolute minimum off-chip components. A complete implantable chip is presented, which highlight the design tradeoffs and optimizations applied to the design of CMOS implantable system chips.

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Abbreviations

ASK:

Amplitude Shift Keying

LSK:

Load Shift Keying

RF:

Radio Frequency

CMOS:

Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor

MCU:

Microcontroller Unit

TSMC:

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company

BJT:

Bipolar Junction Transistors

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Acknowledgment

The authors deeply appreciated the technical support from the National Chip Implementation Center (CIC) and financial support from National Science Council of R.O.C. The funding is under the grant of NSC 97-2218-E-033-001 (2008/11/01-2009/10/31). The authors also express gratitude to Dr. Jeng Gong of National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) for the use of Agilent 3585A Spectrum Analyzer. The authors are equally grateful to Le Thanh Truc for the prototype MCU integration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chung Yuan Christian University, Chung Li City, Taiwan, 32023, Republic of China

    Alfonso Cesar B. Albason, Danny Wen-Yaw Chung & Shyh-Liang Lou

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  1. Alfonso Cesar B. Albason
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  2. Danny Wen-Yaw Chung
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  3. Shyh-Liang Lou
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Correspondence to Danny Wen-Yaw Chung.

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The research is under the grant of NSC 97-2218-E-033-001.

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Albason, A.C.B., Chung, D.WY. & Lou, SL. A 2 MHz Wireless CMOS Transceiver for Implantable Biosignal Sensing Systems. J Sign Process Syst 62, 263–272 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-010-0459-8

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