A 1-Wire® communication interface between a control hub and locally powered epidural stimulators

This paper presents a modified 1-Wire® based communication architecture between one active and several passive units of a distributed implantable system. The passive slave units are embedded in the electrode array. We focus in particular on the introduction of the physical and data link layer of the communication block, and present post-layout results of simulated data transfer between the hub and one slave in 0.18-μm power management CMOS technology. The communication block has a power consumption of 12.5 μW for a gross bit rate of 11.1 kBit/s. The proposed interface is inherently safe and suitable for exchanging status and sensor data between implants. The possibility to achieve higher symbol rates is discussed.