Minimally Invasive Square-based Temporal Interference Stimulation IC for Neuromodulation with Enhanced E-field Delivery.

Authors

Yemin Kim, Junhyuck Lee, Jaejun Kil, Dongrim Kim, Byunghun Lee

Published in

IEEE transactions on biomedical circuits and systems. Volume PP. Aug 28, 2026. Epub Aug 28, 2026.

Abstract

Temporal interference stimulation (TIS) has emerged as a promising neuromodulation technique for achieving deep brain stimulation (DBS) with reduced invasiveness. However, conventional transcutaneous TIS suffers from the current shunting effect from the scalp, which limits the electric-field (E-field) delivery to the target region. In addition, conventional sine-based TIS systems rely on noise-sensitive and linearity constrained analog waveform synthesizers. To address these limitations, this work presents a minimally invasive square-based TIS integrated circuit (IC) that simultaneously achieves enhanced E-field delivery and fully digital stimulation waveform generation. The system generates temporal interference (TI) envelopes by digitally controlling an ON/OFF H-bridge driver, significantly simplifying circuit implementation with a gate-driving overhead of only 250 nW per channel. It also delivers higher root-mean square (RMS) energy than sine-based TIS under identical peak-current conditions. The stimulation IC is integrated within a 0.96 mm² active area. Experimental tissue phantom measurements show that the proposed system achieves a 2.01 dB higher PSD at Δf and a time-domain envelope amplitude approximately 1.27 times that of sine-based TIS, demonstrating enhanced Δf envelope delivery. The proposed system supports long-term operation (1 s-1 h) and real-time parameter control through an inductive-link interface. It also achieves one of the lowest reported system complexities. These results demonstrate the feasibility of a programmable wireless TIS system for the proposed minimally invasive on-skull configuration.

PMID:
42664094
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 29 Aug 2026.

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