Wirelessly powered implantable pacemaker with on-chip antenna

Abstract

We present a battery-less mm-sized wirelessly powered pacemaker microchip with on-chip antenna in 180nm CMOS process. The microchip harvests RF radiation from an external source in the X-band frequency, with the size of 4mm by 1mm. The in-vivo experiment is demonstrated successfully on a live pig heart. The pacemaker can be wirelessly powered with a distance of 2cm. It generates a stimulation pulse signal with a voltage magnitude of 1.3V. The wireless pacing testing was successfully demonstrated by changing the heart rhythm frequency from 1.67Hz to 2.87Hz.