VCSEL based CMOS Integrated Optical Telemetry Link for Miniaturized Implants

Implantable wireless sensing platforms are believed to revolutionize personal health care. Such systems need to communicate implant data to a reader outside the body. Wireless communication schemes eliminate the need for wires through biological interfaces for such communication. Optical communication links can be useful for such applications due to extremely small size scale. In this letter, a telemetry scheme is presented that uses a micro-laser integrated with a complementary metal oxide semiconductor-based implantable platform. It is shown that this scheme can communicate a signal reliably from sub-mm implants to external detectors through actual tissue sample. A comparative analysis of this work with other techniques is also presented.