Single coil pair transcutaneous energy and analogue signal via an R-2R resistor network, made up of 1% tolerance

data transceiver for low power bio-implant 1.1KV and 2.2 KV surface mount resistors. Larger values for the
resistor network can be used to decrease overall power consumption
use further. The coils were designed with inner-diameters one-third
of their external diameters, as advised in [7], and produced to the
A. Vilches, A. Sanni and C. Toumazou
highest density (turns/cm) possible using standard FR4 chemical PCB
etching techniques. Table 1 lists coil parameters.
A transcutaneous energy and data transceiver built from low-cost off-
the-shelf components, employing a single pair of planar air-cored
coils fabricated on standard PCB substrates, is presented. The transcei- Table 1: Measured coil parameters
ver powers the receiver continuously via the parallel-tuned coil pair.
Outer diameter 25 mm
The latter is then able to sample audio at 8000 bytes/s and send the bit-
stream to a digital-to-analogue convertor in the transmitter by ampli- Inner diameter 8.5 mm
tude modulating the transmitted power carrier signal. Turns 19
Track width 250 mm
Introduction: A number of transcutaneous energy transmission (TET) Track spacing 200 mm
systems have been proposed as alternatives to battery power in bio- Measured inductance 6.5 mH
implanted devices [1 –3]. These invariably employ one or more pairs Tuning capacitance 1 nF
of coils, one being transcutaneously implanted; facing each other with Measured resistance (DC) 3.1 V
AC energy transfer taking place across the gap between them owing Measured quality factor . 9 at 2 MHz
to the mutual inductance coupling the two coils. The coils are tuned LC tank impedance at 2 MHz  75 V
to the carrier frequency using serial or parallel capacitance, dictated
by the way in which the link is to be driven: serial-serial, serial-parallel, Measured results: Fig. 2 is a trace of the bit-stream. The first (topmost)
parallel-parallel, etc. [4]. The mutual inductance, M, of the coil pair is trace is at the sampling microcontroller’s output, the second trace is at
given by (1) and is a function of the coupling coefficient, k, which is the secondary coil, the third trace from the top is at the primary coil
in turn a function of coil geometry, size and gap length [5]. and the fourth trace (bottom) is the reconstructed bit-stream fed to the
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi transmitting microcontroller that also serves as the DAC. The LC tank
M ¼ k L1L2 ð1Þ almost doubles the 5.6 V input voltage to around 10 Vpk, which
A degree of effort has been invested in designing high-power systems to results in a DC voltage, after rectification, i.e. . 4 V. The ripple
drive artificial heart pumps directly [6] and even charge car batteries [4], caused by modulating the secondary coil is cancelled by the rectification
but most have proposed moderately low-power links with communi- capacitor, Cr. The analogue signal, when buffered into a push-pull tran-
cations links added, either by including an extra RF transceiver or one sistor amplifier, gives a good reproduction of the source audio signal,
or more coil pairs for communications and/or control [3]. albeit slightly muffled by the relatively low audio sample rate.
8000 bytes/s, the maximum possible using the microcontroller’s
5.6Vreg >4V DC
internal A2D with its preset internal 8 MHz clock, limits the system to
a 4 kHz folding frequency. The entire system draws a mean 45 mA
1k 1n L1 L2 1n Cr from a single 5.6 V DC supply, equating to 1/4 watt (5.6 V 
3.8 n
710 k
Q1
2N2222 audio in
0.045 A ¼ 0.252 mW). 25 mA of the total current is only drawn when
the coil drive circuitry is connected, equating to a mean drive into the
10 n
100 n
250 M1
M2 primary of 5.6 V  25 mA ¼ 140 mW rms. The power drawn by the
Q2
2N2222 12F683 sampling microcontroller is ,5 mW.
16F818 PIC uP
10 n 1k PIC uP 2N7000
2N7000
R-2R

audio out

Fig. 1 Simplified circuit diagram of entire transceiver

Prototype transceiver: In the approach presented here, a single, parallel

tuned pair of PCB planar coils is used for both power and data trans-
mission/reception. A simplified circuit diagram of the entire system,
assembled from discrete components, is given in Fig. 1. The transmitter
consists of an off-the-shelf microcontroller (PIC16F818 from
Microchip.com) running at an internally preset factory calibrated fre-
quency of 8 MHz. The controller continuously sends a carrier frequency
of Fosc/4 ¼ 2 MHz, that is the actual instruction clock that the MCU
operates on, to an NMOS transistor, M1, that is used to switch current
through the primary coil, which is tuned by a parallel capacitor to res-
onate at 2 MHz. The carrier signal is electromagnetically coupled to
the secondary coil, also tuned to 2 MHz, via a 5 mm air gap where it Fig. 2 Captured bits-stream at various points in system
is rectified and turned into a nominal DC voltage (min 4V, max 5.5V) First (topmost) trace is at sampling microcontroller’s output, second trace is at
by a single diode and regulating capacitor Cr. The DC voltage then secondary coil, third trace from top is at primary coil, fourth trace (bottom) is
reconstructed bit-stream fed to transmitting microcontroller
powers a second microcontroller (PIC12F683) that continuously
samples an audio signal at 8000 bytes/s using its inbuilt analogue-to-
digital sampling circuitry. The sampled data is turned into a serial bit- Conclusions: The transceiver presented is simple and has low-cost
stream by the controller and driven into the gate of another NMOS tran- implementation using widely available PCB processing equipment and
sistor, M2, connected in a common source topology across the secondary discrete components. No special communication chipsets or protocols
coil, to the left of the rectifier’s anode. The bit-stream thus amplitude are used and our built prototype proves that it is capable of powering
modulates the incoming carrier to such an extent that a small (,5%) a low power implant and continuously retrieving thousands of bytes
amount of AM signal appears on the primary coil. This signal is then per second over a 5 mm air gap. It is clear that an increase in coil
buffer-rectified and amplified to reproduce the original bit-stream. A density would benefit the design since it would lower drive power, the
comparator may also be used to switch the output cleanly between secondary circuit being over-supplied by the coils currently used and
supply rails. It is then fed into the primary microcontroller, which is con- that is something that the authors will endeavour to correct with the
figured to perform continuous digital-to-analogue conversion, where the aid of clean-room processing techniques in the near future. Further
data is once again converted into a parallel bit-word and output as an circuit improvements are expected to include an all CMOS coil driver

ELECTRONICS LETTERS 2nd July 2009 Vol. 45 No. 14

Authorized licensed use limited to: Imperial College London. Downloaded on March 31,2010 at 08:40:59 EDT from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
to increase power efficiency and a mixer based signal demodulator to
improve further the signal-to-noise ratio.
Acknowledgments: This work is supported by the Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council, grant no. EPSRC/EP/F04612X/1.
# The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009
17 February 2009
doi: 10.1049/el.2009.0457
A. Vilches, A. Sanni and C. Toumazou (Institute of Biomedical
Engineering, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus,
London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom)
E-mail: a.vilches@imperial.ac.uk
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ELECTRONICS LETTERS 2nd July 2009 Vol. 45 No. 14
Authorized licensed use limited to: Imperial College London. Downloaded on March 31,2010 at 08:40:59 EDT from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
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