Abstract
Bio-medical implantable devices have drawn more and more attention in recent years. Extensive studies in neuroscience prove that neural stimulation techniques may cure or at least improve some diseases caused by neural abnormal discharge or disability. However, two of the major challenges of implantable devices are combining a high-voltage driver and low-voltage digital control in a single chip, and accommodating large voltages in smaller feature size technology. This paper presents a new stimulator circuit structure to address these problems, using a novel voltage clothing design to reduce the voltage supply from 20V to 12V. A new folding-voltage technique solves the reliability issue. The proposed design has been fabricated with TSMC 0.18μm 1P6M CMOS technology.