Low power memristor based voltage controlled oscillator for electrical neural stimulation

Neural stimulation is one of the most important stimulations in biomedical engineering because it is used to treat the chronic pain such as Parkinson's disease. The main challenge in designing a very low frequency oscillator is the large physical dimensions of the passive elements used in the circuit that occupy large Silicon area. Therefore, the memristor can be used instead of resistance to decrease the Silicon area and to achieve low power consumption. That is because the memristor has two important advantages to be used in the voltage controlled oscillator design for electrical neural stimulation which are: (1) nano scale dimensions and (2) low power consumption. This paper presents a memristor based new voltage controlled oscillator for electrical neural stimulation. The proposed circuit generates low frequency range from 104 Hz to 203 Hz with low power consumption equal 0.79 mW which is the main challenge in deep brain stimulators and the total Silicon area is 0.67 mm².