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This paper presents a high-gain on-chip antenna using a sapphire substrate for implantable wireless medical systems. The antenna model is based on a dipole and the antenna elements are appropriately rolled for impedance matching. The center frequency of the fabricated on-chip antenna was measured as 360 MHz. The return loss was −3.58 dB and the input impedance was 190.5 − j74.7 Ω at 360 MHz. The maximum antenna gain of the fabricated on-chip antenna was −29.2 dBi. The on-chip antenna using a sapphire substrate achieved a 12.9 dB higher gain than that using a silicon substrate and successfully induced signal transmission at a distance of 10 cm with a transmitter chip. The implemented on-chip antenna can improve the power efficiency of implantable wireless medical systems by 95%.

In this paper, a co-design method and a wafer-level packaging technique of a flexible antenna and a CMOS rectifier chip for use in a small-sized implantable system on the brain surface are proposed. The proposed co-design method optimizes the system architecture, and can help avoid the use of external matching components, resulting in the realization of a small-size system. In addition, the technique employed to assemble a silicon large-scale integration (LSI) chip on the very thin parylene film (5 μm) enables the integration of the rectifier circuits and the flexible antenna (rectenna). In the demonstration of wireless power transmission (WPT), the fabricated flexible rectenna achieved a maximum efficiency of 0.497% with a distance of 3 cm between antennas. In addition, WPT with radio waves allows a misalignment of 185% against antenna size, implying that the misalignment has a less effect on the WPT characteristics compared with electromagnetic induction.

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