An Ultra Low Power System Architecture for Implantable Medical Devices

Abstract

Due to the fruitful growth in the industry of medical devices especially in implantable medical devices, the research in this area has grown in the past few years. This paper presents an embedded processor platform chip suitable for medical applications requiring minimal power consumption. While this paper focuses on the key electronic features of implantable circuits and the integration of these features into silicon, it covers a proposed chip-architecture in design. This proposed design explores the partitioning of a chip, as well as the tradeoffs associated with design choices especially intelligent power management. Finally, it briefly covers the key attributes required in the silicon technology used for implementing implantable integrated circuit designs.

Keywords

• Cardiac implant
• neural implant
• ultra low power (ULP)
• implantable medical device (IMD) system architecture
• power management
• signal processing