Design of implantable on-chip antenna for bio-telemetry applications at ISM 2.45 GHz

Implantable medical device (IMD) with on-chip antenna (OCA) has got an increasing attention for the biotelemetry applications to monitors the patient's health condition by transmitting the sensed bio-signal to the monitoring device outside the body. This paper presents a novel OCA designed by using standard 0.18um CMOS technology to operate at ISM 2.45 GHz. Using two oxide layers namely, Silicon dye oxide (SiO
₂
) above the Si substrate and Hafnium oxide (HfO
₂
) on the SiO
₂
layer, a meander line Microstrip patch antenna with Al is embedded on the top of the HfO
₂
layer. Above the patch, Si
₃
N
₄
layer is embedded to make it biocompatible. The proposed compact OCA of dimensions 3 × 3.45 × 0.3922 mm
³
is useful for such applications as it provides a good return loss of 47.62 dB with an acceptable gain of -14dB as simulated under the human body environment using Ansys HFSS EM simulation tools. The effectiveness of the proposed OCA is presented by comparing the results of reported articles.