A Wirelessly Powered High-Speed Transceiver for High-Density Bidirectional Neural Interfaces

This paper presents a wirelessly powered, fully-integrated, low-power full-duplex transceiver to support high-density and bidirectional neural implants. The transmitter (TX) uses impulse radio ultra-wide band based on an edge combining approach, and the receiver (RX) uses a 2.4-GHz on-off keying narrow band topology. The proposed transceiver provides dual band 500-Mbps TX uplink data rate and 100 Mbps RX downlink data rate, and it is fully integrated into standard TSMC 0.18-mu m CMOS within a total size of 0.8 mm(2). The total measured power consumption is 10.4 mW in full duplex mode (5 mW at 100 Mbps for RX, and 5.4 mW at 800 Mbps or 6.7 pJ/bit for TX). The transceiver is wirelessly powered up by a smart home-cage system based on overlapped multicoil arrays through a thin implantable multicoil receiver of 1x1 cm(2) of size, implanted bellow the scalp of a laboratory mouse, and integrated power management circuits. This inductive system is designed to deliver up to 35.5 mW of power delivered to the load from a 13.56-MHz carrier signal with an overall power transfer efficiency above 5% across a separation distance ranging from 3 cm to 5 cm.