Florian Waschkowski

Development of a very large array for retinal stimulation

Retina degeneration is one of the leading causes of blindness nowadays and cannot be cured in most cases. It has been shown that electrical stimulation of retinal ganglion cells can generate visual perceptions and therefore implantable electrode arrays can be possible treatment for these patients. Most implants developed for that purpose use electrode arrays with a size of a few millimeters squared and therefore could restore only a very small field of vision and hardly improve orientation in an unknown environment. In this paper we present results of the development of an implantable electrode array covering about 100 mm2 of retinal tissue.

Design of a CMOS image sensor and stimulation IC for a wide-angle retina implant

In this work the design of a new epiretinal stimulator approach with integrated bendable imaging sensor is presented. First, the fundamental differences to the existing retinal stimulation implants is described. In the second part, a brief description of the novel designed implant is given, where several integrated circuits are placed on a single polyimide foil to create the mechanically flexible implant. Then the design of the developed dies is presented, containing the image sensor with a signal processing unit, a configurable waveform generator and a current controlled stimulation unit.