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VLSI IMPLEMENTATION OF WIRELESS NEURAL RECORDING MICROSYSTEM FOR NEUROMUSCULAR STIMULATION
3.1 REVIEW OF THE RECORDING MICROSYSTEM
With the advancements in the semiconductor industry, the very large-scale integrated (VLSI) technology has made impressive improvements in the past 10 years. Integrating more and more functionalities into a chip has become feasible.
System-on-chip (SoC) is a mainstream in which the whole circuit and all digital and mixed-signal components are integrated into a single substrate of silicon [1]. SoC can be used in many branches of microelectronics, such as biomedical applications (e.g., health monitoring, medical diagnosis, microsurgery, nanochemistry, and environmental monitoring), which have been a prominent topic. Due to the highly integrated and single-chip characteristics of SoC, biomedical devices have benefited the most from SoC, especially when they are intended to be implantable. Hence, an increase in the number biomicrosystem-related research is expected in the future.
Following the mainstream, many researchers have devoted their time to the development of biomedical devices. As Figure 3.1 shows, almost every aspect of human health can be monitored or regulated by an implanted device. Hence, studies on biomedical devices and systems being implanted into the human body have increased rapidly. A number of published research have stressed that it is efficient to generate neural action ...
