A 2μW digital baseband core for wireless Micro-Neural-Interface in 0.18μm CMOS

This paper presents the design of a low power digital baseband core with a custom-tailored protocol for wirelessly powered Micro-Neural-Interface (MNI) system on a chip (SoC) to be implanted within the skull to record cortical neural activities. The core, on the tag end of multiple sensors, is designed to control the operation and the interface with the whole MNI SoC based on received downlink commands and store/dump targeted neural data uplink in an energy efficient way. Robust low power cell library and on-chip SRAM memory are specially designed to achieve robust low-voltage operation with targeted timing constraints. The average measured power is 2μW at 1.28MHz system clock under 450mV power supply and a communication data rate of 640Kbps.