Liu Kangni, Gormaley Anne, Woeppel Kevin, Emerick Trent, Cui X Tracy, Kubendran Rajkumar
Department of ECE, University of Pittsburgh.
Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh.
IEEE Biomed Circuits Syst Conf. 2023 Oct;2023. doi: 10.1109/biocas58349.2023.10389016.
Neurostimulation therapies are often applied as an alternative method to pharmaceutical treatment for chronic pain relief. This paper demonstrates the design and implementation of a programmable Pulse Generator (PG) for analgesic nerve stimulation with 3 modes of operation: biphasic asymmetric, biphasic capacitor coupled, and monophasic Degradation On Command (DOC). The PG is implemented on 180nm CMOS technology and could generate up to ± 4mA current pulses in steps of 31A (8-bit resolution) for pulse duration range of 1-256s and stimulation frequency range of 16Hz-250kHz. During studies, capacitor-coupled biphasic stimulation provides electrode stability with only 5Ω impedance change for up to 14 million pulses. In the DOC mode, accelerated degradation of a bioresorbable electrode was observed after 24hrs of stimulation, when its impedance increased from about 100Ω to over 0.2MΩ at 500Hz. The compact, tunable and battery-powered pulse generator printed circuit board (PCB) shows promising results to perform animal studies for up to 30 hours of continuous stimulation with 26.4mW peak power consumption.
神经刺激疗法通常作为缓解慢性疼痛的药物治疗的替代方法应用。本文展示了一种可编程脉冲发生器（PG）的设计与实现，该脉冲发生器用于镇痛神经刺激，具有三种操作模式：双相不对称、双相电容耦合和单相按需降解（DOC）。该PG采用180nm CMOS技术实现，对于1 - 256s的脉冲持续时间范围和16Hz - 250kHz的刺激频率范围，能够以31μA的步长（8位分辨率）生成高达±4mA的电流脉冲。在研究过程中，电容耦合双相刺激在高达1400万个脉冲时仅产生5Ω的阻抗变化，从而提供电极稳定性。在DOC模式下，可生物吸收电极在刺激24小时后观察到加速降解，在500Hz时其阻抗从约100Ω增加到超过0.2MΩ。紧凑、可调且由电池供电的脉冲发生器印刷电路板（PCB）在进行动物研究时显示出有前景的结果，能够以26.4mW的峰值功耗进行长达30小时的连续刺激。
