Advanced power management ASIC for wirelessly powered and energy scavenging deep implants

The last decade has seen a tremendous revolution in all kinds of wearable health devices. Advances in ultra-low-power analog circuit design for various health sensing as well as advances in sensor technology for various biomarkers have been instrumental in this revolution. While wearables are becoming increasingly mainstream, the research field is seeing a shift toward minimally invasive implantable solutions. Miniature electronic implants like pacemakers, cochlear implants, deep-brain stimulation, and electrical nerve stimulators are truly saving lives and improving quality of life dramatically. Ever more advanced sensor technology and ultra-low-power interface electronics pave the way for a whole slew of innovative miniature implants. This is a rapidly evolving scientific field with many research opportunities. One of the key challenges remains to power such advanced implants. Today all implants are battery-powered. This poses a number of challenges around biocompatibility, safety, size, and surgery complexity, ... Also, from a sustainability point of view, there is a strong interest to get rid of batteries because they often require rare earth metals and medical devices are not easily recyclable. A potential solution lies in wireless power transfer and energy harvesting. There are many different technologies that can be considered for wireless power transfer (ultrasound, RF, magnetic, ...) as well as for energy harvesting (heat, motion, electro-magnetic, chemical reactions, ...). However, no matter which technology is being used, for small, deep tissue implants, the available power at the implant is always going to be very low. In this PhD, we will research power management circuitry that can efficiently harvest power from very weak sources and efficiently boost the available power to voltage levels able to power normal circuitry.