Trigeminal Neuralgia Alleviation on Demand with an CMOS SoC Using Current-mode Pulsed Radio-Frequency Stimulation

This paper presents a design of batteryless CMOS system-on-a-chip (SoC) with dual-mode programmable pulsed radio-frequency (PRF) stimulation, temperature detection, and wireless communication for trigeminal neuralgia alleviation on demand. The system is capable of providing square wave, sinusoid wave, and patterned stimulation waveform, and the stimulation parameters which include pulse frequency, amplitude, duty cycle, and pulse duration, can be wirelessly reconfigured by the external handheld device. The temperature sensor incorporated with analog front-end circuit can detect the temperature of body and SoC chip for the prevention of possible abnormal operation. All the information of stimulation parameters and temperature can be real-time monitored by a handheld device through wireless communication, which follows medical implanted communication system (MICS) standard. This SoC chip, whose dimension is 3.11 × 2.73 mm2, is fabricated in standard 0.35um CMOS process and mounted on a compact test board, whose size is 2.6 × 2.1 cm2, for delivering PRF stimulation in animal studies.