A Fully-Implantable Cochlear Implant SoC With Piezoelectric Middle-Ear Sensor and Arbitrary Waveform Neural Stimulation Marcus Yip, Rui Jin , Student Member , IEEE, Hideko Heidi Nakajima, Kons tantina M. Stankovic

Abstract

A system-on-chip for an invisible, fully-implantable cochlear implant is presented. I mplantable acoustic sensing is achieved by interfacing the SoC t o a piezoelectric sensor that de- tects 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. Ah i g h l y - r e c o nfigurable digital sound processor enables system power scalability by recon figuring the number of channels, and provides programmable features to enable a patient-speci fic fit. A mixed-signal arbitrary waveform neural stimulator enables energy-optimal stimulation pulses to be delivered to the auditory nerve. The energy-optima l 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.