A Multi-Channel Stimulator With High-Resolution Time-to-Current Conversion for Vagal-Cardiac Neuromodulation
Wu, Y, Jiang, D, Demosthenous, A
Abstract
This paper presents an integrated stimulator for a cardiac neuroprosthesis aiming to restore the parasympathetic control after heart transplantation. The stimulator is based on time-to-current conversion. Instead of the conventional current mode digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that uses ten of microamp for biasing, the proposed design uses a novel capacitor time-based DAC offering close to 10 bit of current amplitude resolution while using only a bias current 250 nA. The stimulator chip was design in a 0.18 m CMOS high-voltage (HV) technology. It consists of 16 independent channels, each capable of delivering 550 A stimulus current under a HV output stage that can be operated up to 30 V. Featuring both power efficiency and high-resolution current amplitude stimulation, the design is suitable for multi-channel neural simulation applications.