Miniaturized Resonant Power Conversion for Implanted Medical Devices

Abstract

The design of a millimetre-sized power converter is proposed which is based on coil coupling that could be integrated into the neural or cardiac implantable medical device (IMD) to provide isolated power or energy transmission by harvesting it from external transmitter device. A special step-up case of transformer coupling to a millimetre-sized receiver coil by a comparatively larger transmitter coil is examined. This paper is expected to increase research efforts to develop the battery-less IMD's with reduced size, low power, high efficiency, and improved reliability and feasibility. Based on our work, we believe that the inductive coupling link with low loss ferrite material is the suitable method to be used to power the batteryless devices. The converter produces the targeted output power of more than 400 μW with 1 mm3 size of the coil at 2 MHz.

Keywords

• Energy harvesting
• implantable medical devices
• ferrite core
• inductive coupling link
• power efficiency