High-Speed Communication Up to 600 Mbps Over FDA-Cleared implantable Wirelines

The demand for sophisticated electronic interfaces between multiple implanted devices is increasing, demonstrated by recent work in neural prosthetics and peripheral neuromodulation. Biocompatibility, chronic use, and robust operation are major requirements in such systems. This manuscript reports on the design of transceiver circuits for fully implantable wireline communication using voltage-mode, charge-balanced signaling over FDA-cleared leads and connectors. A prototype system composed of FPGAs and other off-the-shelf hardware is demonstrated with in vitro measurements, achieving 400 Mbps communication over 12 dB of channel loss with 3.0 V signaling and <;10-
¹²
BER. Post-layout simulation results from a 180 nm CMOS implementation show a >1000x improvement in power consumption and 1.5x improvement in data rate over the FPGA-based system. These rates are sufficient to communicate 2000 channels of neural recordings sampled with typical parameters.