A programmable energy efficient readout chip for a multiparameter highly integrated implantable biosensor system

Abstract. In this work an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) for an implantable electrochemical biosensor system (SMART implant, Stett et al., 2014) is presented. The ASIC drives the measurement electrodes and performs amperometric measurements for determining the oxygen concentration, potentiometric measurements for evaluating the pH-level as well as temperature measurements. A 10-bit pipeline analog to digital (ADC) is used to digitize the acquired analog samples and is implemented as a single stage to reduce power consumption and chip area. For pH measurements, an offset subtraction technique is employed to raise the resolution to 12-bits. Charge integration is utilized for oxygen and temperature measurements with the capability to cover current ranges between 30 nA and 1 μA. In order to achieve good performance over a wide range of supply and process variations, internal reference voltages are generated from a programmable band-gap regulated circuit and biasing currents are supplied from a wide-range bootstrap current reference. To accommodate the limited available electrical power, all components are designed for low power operation. Also a sequential operation approach is applied, in which essential circuit building blocks are time multiplexed between different measurement types. All measurement sequences and parameters are programmable and can be adjusted for different tissues and media. The chip communicates with external unites through a full duplex two-wire Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), which receives operational instructions and at the same time outputs the internally stored measurement data. The circuit has been fabricated in a standard 0.5-μm CMOS process and operates on a supply as low as 2.7 V. Measurement results show good performance and agree with circuit simulation. It consumes a maximum of 500 μA DC current and is clocked between 500 kHz and 4 MHz according to the measurement parameters. Measurement results of the on-chip ADC show a Differential Non Linearity (DNL) lower than 0.5 LSB, an Integral Non Linearity (INL) lower than 1 LSB and a Figure of Merit (FOM) of 6 pJ/conversion.