Neural Stimulator Design

Neural stimulation is a widely used technique in neuroscience research and clinical therapies. An electrical stimulator needs to meet high-level requirements for safety, reliability, programmability, with a minimum heat dissipation. This work first gives an overview of neural stimulator design, including the physicochemical background, design requirements, system topologies, and circuit techniques. Methods for stimulus generation, stimulation waveforms, electrode configuration, and charge balancing techniques are reviewed and analyzed in detail. Then, the design and testing of a fully programmable multi-functional stimulator are presented. In addition, a novel stimulation strategy is proposed to achieve charge balancing in existence of irreversible electrochemical processes and unrecoverable charge injection. A high-efficiency net-zero charge neural stimulator is designed using the proposed strategy. The fabricated chip has been successfully verified in both bench testing and animal experiments.

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