A Low-Power PLL-Less Wideband OOK Wireless Neural-Signal Transmitter for Miniaturized Neural Interfaces with In Vivo...

High-channel-count neural recording requires wireless links with high throughput, low power, and compact implementation, yet commercial protocols and phase-locked loop (PLL)-based transmitters often trade data rate against power and complexity. We present a low-power, PLL-less wideband on-off keying (OOK) neural-signal transmitter fabricated in a 180 nm CMOS process. The transmitter employs a free-running inductor-capacitor voltage-controlled oscillator (LC-VCO), a Gilbert mixer for OOK modulation and reverse isolation, and a current-reuse stacked power amplifier. It consumes 8 mA from a 3.3 V supply (26.4 mW), demonstrates modulation and receiver frame acquisition at a maximum raw input rate of 90 Mbps, corresponding to a 180 Mbps Manchester-coded line rate, and tunes from 3.266 to 3.445 GHz. End-to-end bit error rate (BER) was measured at raw rates of 15 and 31.2 Mbps, corresponding to encoded rates of 30 and 62.4 Mbps; the latter matches the in vivo data stream. The transmitter was integrated with a 128-channel recording chip and evaluated in freely moving adult C57 mice. Wireless hippocampal spike and local field potential (LFP) recordings, wired-system comparison, and event-locked LFP analysis support its feasibility for untethered neural recording.