Overview 

Neurological disorders generally effect the hearing, seeing or moving behaviors of human. There are numerous well-known neurological disorders like Epilepsy and Parkinson’s which account for a large percent of global morbidity. To treat these kind of disorders, neural stimulator is a popular solution to overcome the loss of sensing function. Implantable devices have been widely used in several biomedical applications. The primary requirements for neural stimulator are small-form factor, reliability, stimulation efficiency, patient safety and low power consumption. Our work strongly concentrates on adaptive power supply for stimulator channels of the cochlear implantable system to improve hearing behaviors of human.

Purpose

Dual-phase reconfigurable switched-capacitor converter is developed and optimized to adaptively supply power for stimulator channels in cochlear implantable devices. The output voltage can automatively adjust 1~4*Vin according to signals received from the mode detector of stimulator channels. The prototype is designed using 180nm CMOS low voltage technology with the input voltage at 3.3V.

Development Direction 

Dual-phase switched-capacitor topology is implemented to achieve low output impedance as well as high stimulator current instead of using single-stage DC-DC converters. Besides, stacked MOSFETs are used to tackle breakdown-voltage problems when the proposed topology is designed using 180nm CMOS low voltage technology.

Poster