Design Trade-Offs for Neural Stimulators Optimization

Recently, electrical stimulation has been widely used for biomedical applications, such as cardiac pacemaker, cochlear implant, muscle exercising, vision restoration, and seizure suppression. This paper presents two compact and power-efficient optimized neural stimulators for seizure suppression. These neural stimulators compromise between various design trade-offs such as adaptability with the load variations, multi-waveform generation for different seizures suppression, power efficiency, and linearity issues. The first design is an adaptable closed-loop current stimulator with a bipolar electrode, while the other design is a multi-waveform open-loop current stimulator with a unipolar electrode. Finally, the first design optimizes the power consumption to 429.68 μW and occupies 0.11 mm
²
. However, the second design achieves a high-power efficiency equals 96.47 % and occupies 0.015 mm
²
. Both stimulators are implemented using UMC 0.13 μm CMOS technology.