Neural Dielet 2.0: A 128-Channel 2mm×2mm Battery-Free Neural Dielet Merging Simultaneous Multi-Channel Transmission through Multi-Carrier Orthogonal Backscatter.

Abstract

Miniaturization of wireless neural-recording systems enables minimally-invasive surgery and alleviates the rejection reactions for implanted brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. Simultaneous massive-channel recording capability is essential to investigate the behaviors and inter-connections in billions of neurons. In recent years, battery-free techniques based on wireless power transfer (WPT) and backscatter communication have reduced the sizes of neural-recording implants by battery eliminating and antenna sharing. However, the existing battery-free chips realize the multi-channel merging in the signal-acquisition circuits, which leads to large chip area, signal attenuation, insufficient channel number or low bandwidth, etc. In this work, we demonstrate a 2mm×2mm battery-free neural dielet, which merges 128 channels in the wireless part. The neural dielet is fabricated with 65nm CMOS process, and measured results show that: 1) The proposed multi-carrier orthogonal backscatter technique achieves a high data rate of 20.16Mb/s and an energy efficiency of 0.8pJ/bit. 2) A self-calibrated direct digital converter (SC-DDC) is proposed to fit the 128 channels in the 2mm×2mm die, and then the all-digital implementation achieves 0.02mm² area and 9.87μW power per channel.