Albano, F: Power Supplies For Wireless Integrated Microsyste

In this work, we developed a novel power supply for the WIMS-ERC (Wireless Integrated Microsystems - Engineering Research Center, Ann Arbor, MI) intraocular sensor (WIMS-IOS), an autonomous and implantable system. This device is representative of a broad class of microscale devices, whose full implementation in environmental and medical systems will require significantly smaller power supplies; presently, battery systems represent 85% mass and 50% volume of typical devices and they have intrinsically high power (3.5-4.2V) based on lithium chemistry which complicates integration with low- voltage MEMS, since it necessitates voltage regulation. Our underlying hypothesis was that selection of the optimum electrochemistry and usage of physical vapor deposition would reduce intrinsic losses because of the high resulting precision, while allowing integration with chips because of more benign processing conditions to MEMS. They also offer potentially lower cost than existing systems.