A Somatosensory Feedback System in 180nm CMOS

In this work, the first integrated somatosensory feedback system based on human body communication (HBC) is proposed to restore the sense of touch to a paralyzed hand by tactile sensing and neural stimulation. The proposed system (Fig. 1) includes a base unit (BU), which is located on the wrist and relays the measured force information from an implantable artificial mechanoreceptor (IAM, previously published [1]) located inside the palm or fingertip, to a brain stimulator device (BSD) performing event-driven stimulation. The interference-tolerant OOK RX within the BU achieves 71.2 dB self-interference rejection with an energy consumption of 36.4pJ/bit and an area of 0.065mm2. The 0.17mm2 FSK RX within the BSD achieves an energy consumption of 60pJ/bit with an FSK level difference of 2.2MHz (allowing for higher coil quality factor).