An arbitrary waveform stimulus circuit for visual prostheses using a low-area multibias DAC

Attempts are underway to construct a retinal prosthesis to recover limited vision for blind patients with retinitis pigmentosa using implantable electronic devices. These microchips provide electrical stimulation to damaged retinal tissues using an array of stimulus circuits. This paper describes improvements to conventional circuit designs with significantly decreased implementation area and the ability to support arbitrary stimulus waveforms where an array of such stimulus circuits is required. This yields greater spatial resolution in stimulation owing to more stimulus circuits per chip area. Also introduced are digital-to-analog converter gain prescalar and dc-offset circuits which tune the stimulus circuits to an optimally effective range due to variation in retinal degradation. The prototype chip was fabricated by MOSIS in 1.2-μm CMOS technology.