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-μm 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 1×1 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.