A Fully-Implantable Cochlear Implant SoC With Piezoelectric Middle-Ear Sensor and Arbitrary Waveform Neural Stimulation
A system-on-chip for an invisible, fully-implantable cochlear implant is presented. Implantable acoustic sensing is achieved by interfacing the SoC to a piezoelectric sensor that detects the sound-induced motion of the middle ear. Measurements from human cadaveric ears demonstrate that the sensor ca...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
|---|---|
| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
2017
|
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/110784 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5977-2748 |
| Summary: | A system-on-chip for an invisible, fully-implantable cochlear implant is presented. Implantable acoustic sensing is achieved by interfacing the SoC to a piezoelectric sensor that detects the sound-induced motion of the middle ear. Measurements from human cadaveric ears demonstrate that the sensor can detect sounds between 40 and 90 dB SPL over the speech bandwidth. A highly-reconfigurable digital sound processor enables system power scalability by reconfiguring the number of channels, and provides programmable features to enable a patient-specific fit. A mixed-signal arbitrary waveform neural stimulator enables energy-optimal stimulation pulses to be delivered to the auditory nerve. The energy-optimal waveform is validated with in-vivo measurements from four human subjects which show a 15% to 35% energy saving over the conventional rectangular waveform. Prototyped in a 0.18 μm high-voltage CMOS technology, the SoC in 8-channel mode consumes 572 μW of power including stimulation. The SoC integrates implantable acoustic sensing, sound processing, and neural stimulation on one chip to minimize the implant size, and proof-of-concept is demonstrated with measurements from a human cadaver ear. |
|---|