Magnetoelectric backscatter communication for millimeter-sized wireless biomedical implants
Zhanghao Yu, Fatima Alrashdan, Wei Wang, Matthew Parker, Xinyu Chen, Frank Chen, Joshua Woods, Zhiyu Chen, Jacob T. Robinson, Kaiyuan Yang
Abstract
This paper presents the design, implementation, and experimental evaluation of a wireless biomedical implant platform exploiting the magnetoelectric effect for wireless power and bi-directional communication. As an emerging wireless power transfer method, magnetoelectric is promising for mm-scaled bio-implants because of its superior misalignment sensitivity, high efficiency, and low tissue absorption compared to other modalities [46, 59, 60]. Utilizing the same physical mechanism for power and communication is critical for implant miniaturization, but low-power magnetoelectric uplink communication has not been achieved yet. For the first time, we design and demonstrate near-zero power magnetoelectric backscatter from the mm-sized implants by exploiting the converse magnetostriction effects.