Towards a highly-scalable wireless implantable system-on-a-chip for gastric electrophysiology

This paper presents the system design of a highly-scalable system-on-a-chip (SoC) to wirelessly and chronically detect the mechanisms underlying gastric dysrhythmias. The proposed wireless implantable gastric-wave recording (WIGR) SoC records gastric slow-wave and spike activities from 256 sites, and establishes transcutaneous data communication with an external reader while being inductively powered. The SoC is highly scalable by employing a modular architecture for the analog front-end (AFE), a near-field pulse-delay modulation (PDM) data transmitter (Tx) that its data rate is proportional to the power carrier frequency (f
_p
), and an adaptive power management equipped with automatic-resonance tuning (ART) that dynamically compensates for environmental and f
_p
variations of the implant power coil. The simulation and measurement results for individual blocks have been presented.