A Low-Power Cochlear Implant DSP Microsystem with Hybrid LC Clocking

Increased integration of components into a single SoC will enable performance improvements in bio-medical applications. The microsystem described here combines an energy-efficient MCU, the first reported cochlear implant (CI) algorithm-specific DSP core and a self-referenced hybrid LC oscillator clock reference into a monolithic SoC intended for use in CIs. By merging all of these components on a single substrate, area and power consumption of the system are greatly reduced compared to present CI systems without sacrificing performance. This makes fully implantable CIs feasible in the near future; something that is not possible with traditional CI approaches due to size and power requirements. This SoC has been developed as part of the Wireless Integrated MicroSystems (WIMS) Engineering Research Center (ERC).