Gastric seed: Toward distributed ultrasonically interrogated millimeter-sized implants for large-scale gastric electrical-wave recording

This brief presents the concept of Gastric Seed, which is an ultrasonically interrogated millimeter-sized implant for gastric electrical-wave [also known as slow waves (SWs)] recording. A network of Gastric Seeds can be endoscopically implanted within the stomach submucosal space for large-scale SW recording. This brief also summarizes our recent effort toward Gastric Seed development including ultrasonic (US) self-regulated power management and addressable US pulse-based data transfer. The proposed power management in the form of a voltage doubler only requires a single off-chip capacitor for simultaneous rectification, regulation and over-voltage protection (OVP) by utilizing US transducer's internal capacitance and reverse current. For data transfer, sharp US pulses are transmitted to reduce the implant's power consumption. A proof-of-concept addressable chip was fabricated in a 0.35-μm standard CMOS process. Utilizing two pairs of millimeter-sized stacked power/data US transducers spaced by 3.75 cm in a water tank, the chip achieved measured regulated voltage of 3 V and data rate of 75 kb/s with the data transmitter energy consumption of 440 pJ/bit.