Zero-Power Defense Done Right: Shielding IMDs from Battery-Depletion Attacks

The wireless capabilities of modern Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) make them vulnerable to security attacks. One prominent attack, which has disastrous consequences for the patient’s wellbeing, is the battery Denial-of-Service attack whereby the IMD is occupied with continuous authentication requests from an adversary with the aim of depleting its battery. Zero-Power Defense (ZPD), based on energy harvesting, is known to be an excellent protection against these attacks. This paper raises essential design considerations for employing ZPD techniques in commercial IMDs, offers a critical review of ZPD techniques found in literature and, subsequently, gives crucial recommendations for developing comprehensive ZPD solutions

Cerebellar output controls generalized spike-and-wave discharge occurence

© 2015 The Authors Annals of Neurology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Neurological Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.Disrupting thalamocortical activity patterns has proven to be a promising approach to stop generalized spike-and-wave discharges (GSWDs) characteristic of absence seizures. Here, we investigated to what extent modulation of neuronal firing in cerebellar nuclei (CN), which are anatomically in an advantageous position to disrupt cortical oscillations through their innervation of a wide variety of thalamic nuclei, is effective in controlling absence seizuresPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Design of efficient and safe neural stimulators: a multidisciplinary approach

This book discusses the design of neural stimulator systems which are used for the treatment of a wide variety of brain disorders such as Parkinson’s, depression and tinnitus. Whereas many existing books treating neural stimulation focus on one particular design aspect, such as the electrical design of the stimulator, this book uses a multidisciplinary approach: by combining the fields of neuroscience, electrophysiology and electrical engineering a thorough understanding of the complete neural stimulation chain is created (from the stimulation IC down to the neural cell). This multidisciplinary approach enables readers to gain new insights into stimulator design, while context is provided by presenting innovative design examples. Provides a single-source, multidisciplinary reference to the field of neural stimulation, bridging an important knowledge gap among the fields of bioelectricity, neuroscience, neuroengineering and microelectronics;Uses a top-down approach to understanding the neural activation process: from electrode modeling to cell activation; Discusses the mechanisms leading to neural damage and considers several strategies for electrochemical balance; Describes novel, high frequency stimulation principles that take a fundamentally different approach, compared to existing stimulator designs

High-Frequency Matching of Low-Noise Amplifiers

Moving to higher transition frequencies, lower supply voltages and smaller dimensions are, nowadays, general trends in the semiconductor industry. While operating at lower supply voltages results in a low-power design, smaller dimensions allow the use of a large number of transistors, a high transition frequency (f T ) is accepted as an almighty-good, opening a way to a design of the amplifiers with ever-higher gains and ever-lower noisefigures. However, rather hidden, there are also some drawbacks of such a trend, making the use of some circuit topologies quite questionable. Take the inductivelydegenerated low-noise amplifier, the most-widely used RF amplifier topology, where the input-power match appears to be impossible at high f T s, requiring an inductance in order of pH, that can not be safely designed and integrated on chip. Therefore, a conceptual change in a design approach has resulted in transformer-feedback degenerated low-noise amplifier, presented in this paper. Controlling the transformer coupling coefficient, the power match becomes possible even for the highest values of f T , with at the same time larger and design-safe primary inductor of the implemented transformer. The presented analysis gives full insight into the performances of the newly introduced transformer-feedback degenerated low-noise amplifier scheme

EMI-Resilient Amplifier Circuits

XV, 307 p. 75 illus.online resource

CONCEPT OF SPECTRUM-SIGNAL TRANSFORMATION

So far, there have been introduced many front-end studies, but most of them fail to present, in a consistent way, how the signals are transformed throughout the front-end itself. In this paper, it is intended to introduce a unique presentation of spectrum and signal transformation within RF front-ends. This approach should help researches to have better insight into the high-level modeling and characterization of RF front-ends and accordingly lead to new design strategies. 1