A Fully-Implantable Cochlear Implant SoC With Piezoelectric Middle-Ear Sensor and Arbitrary Waveform Neural Stimulation

A system-on-chip for an invisible, fully-implantable cochlear implant is presented. Implantable acoustic sensing is achieved by interfacing the SoC to a piezoelectric sensor that detects the sound-induced motion of the middle ear. Measurements from human cadaveric ears demonstrate that the sensor ca...

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Published inIEEE journal of solid-state circuits Vol. 50; no. 1; pp. 214 - 229
Main Authors Yip, Marcus, Rui Jin, Nakajima, Hideko Heidi, Stankovic, Konstantina M., Chandrakasan, Anantha P.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States IEEE 01.01.2015
Subjects
Arbitrary waveform
Auditory system
cochlear implant
Cochlear implants
Ear
Electrodes
energy-efficient
hearing loss
implantable
low-voltage
microphone
middle ear
Noise
piezoelectric
reconfigurable
SoC
stimulation
System-on-chip
Transfer functions
ultra-low-power
implantable
SoC
Arbitrary waveform
low-voltage
middle ear
piezoelectric
reconfigurable
energy-efficient
cochlear implant
ultra-low-power
hearing loss
microphone
stimulation
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Summary:A system-on-chip for an invisible, fully-implantable cochlear implant is presented. Implantable acoustic sensing is achieved by interfacing the SoC to a piezoelectric sensor that detects the sound-induced motion of the middle ear. Measurements from human cadaveric ears demonstrate that the sensor can detect sounds between 40 and 90 dB SPL over the speech bandwidth. A highly-reconfigurable digital sound processor enables system power scalability by reconfiguring the number of channels, and provides programmable features to enable a patient-specific fit. A mixed-signal arbitrary waveform neural stimulator enables energy-optimal stimulation pulses to be delivered to the auditory nerve. The energy-optimal waveform is validated with in-vivo measurements from four human subjects which show a 15% to 35% energy saving over the conventional rectangular waveform. Prototyped in a 0.18 μm high-voltage CMOS technology, the SoC in 8-channel mode consumes 572 μW of power including stimulation. The SoC integrates implantable acoustic sensing, sound processing, and neural stimulation on one chip to minimize the implant size, and proof-of-concept is demonstrated with measurements from a human cadaver ear.
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ISSN:0018-9200
1558-173X
DOI:10.1109/JSSC.2014.2355822