Tutorial: Circuit Design Considerations for Implantable Devices

Implantable devices are a unique area for circuit designers. A comprehensive understanding of design trade-offs at the system level is important to ensure device success. The goal of this tutorial is to provide knowledge to CMOS circuit designers with limited biomedical background to understand design challenges and trade-offs for implantable devices. Besides system-level design, examples of topics in this tutorial include RF powering/recharging circuits with hermetic and non-hermetic packaging, communication schemes for data telemetry, tissue interface modeling and circuit techniques to deal with electrode artifacts, signal acquisition circuits including low-power low-noise amplifiers and ADCs, and signal conditioning including both analog and digital approaches.