Demos and Exhibits MobiCom’18, October 29–November 2, 2018, New Delhi, India

Demo: A Sofware-Deined Radio or

Wireless Brain Implants Network
Haili Cai†, Chester Kilfoyle, Jihun Lee, Vincen W. Leung
Lawrence Larson,
Musaa Lokhandwala†, Universiy o Caliornia, San Diego
Arto Nurmikko, La Jolla, CA, USA
Joey Zhu Farah Laiwalla vwleung@eng.ucsd.edu
Universiy o Caliornia, San Diego
Brown Universiy,
La Jolla, CA, USA
Providence, RI, USA
{h7cai, mzlokhan}@eng.ucsd.edu
arah_laiwalla@brown.edu

ABSTRACT brain, as demonstrated in Figure 1. The chip contains a

A novel Brain-Machine Inerace (BMI) sysem based on a dedicated RF micro-antenna and all the analog front-end,
disribued nework o implanable wireless sensors was networking, RF power harvesting and backscattering
proposed. Small CMOS “Neurograin” chips (0.5x0.5 mm2) circuits. To overcome low electromagnetic coupling due to
wih on-chip anenna are designed o harves near-eld the small on-chip antenna, a relay coil (antenna) is
RF energy a ~1 GHz, and backscater 10 Mbps BPSK introduced to concentrate the flux from the Tx antenna
modulaed daa asynchronously and periodically. A [4]. To he auhor’s bes knowledge, it was the first
“Skinpach” soware-dened radio (SDR) receiver is demonstration of a BMI wireless sensor network
realized on a commercial USRP running GNU Radio inherently scalable to beyond 100s of channels.
programs. I down-convers he refeced waves rom he
Neurograins and perorms daa recovery. In his BMI
prooype demonsraion, 32 Neurograins will be
wirelessly powered, while a Skinpach USRP will recover
heir backscatered packes in real-ime.
1 Introduction
Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs) based on wired, invasive
neural sensors [1] had seen significant advancement,
particularly its successfully transition into human clinical
trials. Wireless, fully-implantable neural interface Figure 1: Cortical Surface Neurograin Sensor System.
technologies [2] are he nex “holy-grail” of BMI arena. To
dramatically increase the density and the number of Neurograin recorded data are backscattered to the
channels, an approach comprising CMOS microscale “Skinpatch” demodulator. The recovered data are then
“Neurograin” chips was proposed [3]. The prototype channeled via neurocomputational processing units to the
system targets the surface of the brain, where the functional prosthetic devices. The intended full system
individual nodes are organized into a 2-D grid that freely data flow is depicted in Figure 2. The dotted box shows
floats in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) surrounding the the demonstration described in this paper.
Training Cloud
†Co-primary Neural
authors This demo signal for
data
Computing
This research was developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Implanted decoding Neurocomputational
Skinpatch algorithms for large-
Projects Agency (DARPA), Contract No. N66001-17-C-4013. Autonomous
Transceiver & scale cortical models;
Microchiplets: Smart
Demodulator Wearable
Neurograins Encoded Neurocoder Effector
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal signals for device or
or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or patterned prothesis
distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice stimulation
and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of
this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Figure 2: Overview of Neurograin system.
MobiCom’18, October 29-November 2, 2018, New Delhi, India
© 2018 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). For the initial prototype, we have chosen to implement
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5903-0/18/10.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3241539.3267727 a 1000-channel system, with an overall system latency of

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