This paper presents the design of a system intended to be used as a prosthesis allowing profoundly visually impaired patients to recover partial vision by means of microstimulation in the primary visual cortex area. The main component of the system is a bio-electronic device to be implanted inside the skull of the user, composed of a plurality of stimulation modules, whose actions are controlled via an interface module. Power and data are transmitted to the implant wirelessly through a bidirectional inductive link, allowing diagnosis of the stimulating device and its environment after implantation, as well as power delivery optimization. A high level of flexibility is supported in terms of stimulation parameters, but a configurable communication protocol allows the device to be used with maximum efficiency. The core of an external controller implemented in a system on a programmable chip is also presented, performing data conversion and timing management such that phosphene intensity can be modulated by any parameter defining stimulation, either at the pulse level or in the time domain. Measured performances achieved with a prototype using two types of custom ASICs implemented in a 0.18-mum CMOS process and commercial components fulfill the requirements for a complete visual prosthesis for humans. When on/off activation is used with predefined parameters, stimuli measured on an electronic test bench could attain a rate in excess of 500 k pulses/s.

A high normal zone propagation velocity (NZPV) is a desirable feature in second generation (2G) high-temperature superconductor (HTS) coated conductors (CCs) in order to reduce the probability of developing destructive hot spots. In this work we investigated experimentally the impact of inserting a highly resistive layer that partially covers the HTS-stabilizer interface of 2G HTS CCs. This new layer was called a 'current flow diverter' (CFD). The purpose of the CFD is to concentrate the current at the edges of the tape when the current transfers from the HTS to the stabilizer upon a quench event. A series of commercial 2G HTS tapes were modified in order to integrate a CFD into them. Measurements realized on these modified tapes showed that the CFD architecture allowed the NZPV to be enhanced by at least two orders of magnitude in comparison with unmodified commercial tapes. Furthermore, it was shown that the NZPV can be significantly enhanced with a very small increase in the HTS-stabilizer interfacial resistance, which is of prime importance for the reliability of current contacts in real applications.

Multi-electrode devices are constantly evolving toward a state where complexity and reliability are adequate for providing a breakthrough in visual cortical stimulation allowing the blind to recover partial vision. Yet few research teams have focused on the development of the front-end subsystem that transforms an input image from a camera into stimulation commands. This article collects state-of-the-art knowledge about the appearance and organization of phosphenes, and previous work in image processing dedicated to visual cortical stimulation. Observations and hypothesis about important issues are highlighted, and six image processing strategies that could be used in such a subsystem are presented, from the most optimistic that use brightness modulation to emulate grayscale to the most conservative that use only on/off phosphene evocation.

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