M. R. Abdelhamid, U. Ha, U. Banerjee, F. Adib and A. P. Chandrakasan, "Batteryless, Wireless, and Secure SoC for Implantable Strain Sensing," in IEEE Open Journal of the Solid-State Circuits Society, vol. 3, pp. 41-51, 2023, doi: 10.1109/OJSSCS.2022.3230000.

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed a growing interest in wireless and batteryless implants, due to their potential in long-term biomedical monitoring of in-body conditions, such as internal organ movements, bladder pressure, and gastrointestinal health. Early proposals for batteryless implants relied on inductive near-field coupling and ultrasound harvesting, which require direct contact between the external power source and the human body. To overcome this near-field challenge, recent research has investigated the use of RF backscatter in wireless micro-implants because of its ability to communicate with wireless receivers that are placed at a distance outside the body (∼0.5 m), allowing a more seamless user experience. Unfortunately, existing far-field backscatter designs remain limited in their functionality: they cannot perform biometric sensing or secure data transmission; they also suffer from degraded harvesting efficiency and backscatter range due to the impact of variations in the surrounding tissues. In this article, we present the design of a batteryless, wireless and secure system-on-chip (SoC) implant for in-body strain sensing. The SoC relies on four features: 1) employing a reconfigurable in-body rectenna which can operate across tissues adapting its backscatter bandwidth and center frequency; 2) designing an energy efficient 1.37 mmHg strain sensing front-end with an efficiency of 5.9 mmHg ⋅ nJ/conversion; 3) incorporating an AES-GCM security engine to ensure the authenticity and confidentiality of sensed data while sharing the ADC with the sensor interface for an area-efficient random number generation; 4) implementing an over-the-air closed-loop wireless programming scheme to reprogram the RF front-end to adapt for surrounding tissues and the sensor front-end to achieve faster settling times below 2 s.