An Inductively Powered Converter for Implantable Biochemical Sensor Signal Processing System

In this paper, we propose an inductively powered converter to convert the incoming RF energy into a DC voltage (3.3 V) which powers up the biochemical sensor signal processing system. The converter, which is constructed by clamper, voltage limiter, rectifier, and LDO regulator, is capable of delivering more than 330 muW from a receiver coil to the implant circuitry. The chip area is 0.12times0.48 mm² in the 0.35 mum CMOS process. The performance of the integrated converter has been tested, by using carrier signal in 13.56 MHz. The proposed converter has the merit of low cost, due to its use of the standard CMOS process, without the necessary of adding an extra ESD process.