Overview of On-Chip Stimulator Designs for Biomedical Applications

In recent years, the electrical stimulations have been used for biomedical applications, such as cardiac pacemaker, cochlear implant, muscle exercising, vision restoration, and seizure suppression. Comparing with the traditional treatments by using medicine or surgery, the electrical stimulation was more harmless, flexible, recoverable, and less-destructive. Moreover, with the potential for mass production, CMOS integrated circuits have been designed to implement the electrical stimulators. A comprehensive overview in the field of integrated circuit design for implantable stimulator was presented in this paper. Some basic topologies of output driver designs for implantable stimulators were reviewed. Some advanced techniques based on the reviewed designs to improve the performances were also presented. Since the safety and reliability are the primary concerns when realized the biomedical electronic devices, the on-chip stimulator designs for biomedical applications will continuously be an important design task in advanced CMOS technologies.