An Ultrasonically Powered Wireless System for In Vivo Gastric Slow-Wave Recording

This paper summarizes our recent progress towards Gastric Seed which is an ultrasonically interrogated millimeter-sized implant for gastric electrical activity (also known as slow waves, SWs) recording. We present a proof-of-concept wireless system designed to collect, transmit, and store in vivo SW signals by integrating a prototype Gastric Seed chip, fabricated in a 0.35-µm 2P4M CMOS process, with a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) amplifier, 10-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and pair of microcontrollers (MCU) as radio-frequency (RF) transceivers. The chip includes ultrasonic self-regulated power management and addressable pulse-based data transfer. Utilizing two pairs of millimeter-sized stacked power/data ultrasonic transducers spaced by 6 cm in a water tank, the chip achieved a regulated voltage of 2.5 V and a data rate of 16 kbps. The amplifier was configured to have a gain of 60 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth of 18 mHz to 500 mHz. The MCU’s built-in 10-bit ADC and RF transceiver were used to digitize the SW signal and transmit the data to a computer. In vivo, SW was recorded wirelessly from the stomach of an anesthetized rat. The recorded SWs showed a frequency of 1.5 cycle-per-minute (cpm) and maximum and minimum amplitudes of 1.03 mV and 0.28 mV peak-to-peak, respectively.