A programmable controller for spatio-temporal pattern stimulation of cortical visual prosthesis.

This paper proposes a programmable stimulation controller for cortical visual prosthesis to configure spatiotemporal parameters of stimulation. Since the relationship between stimulation to the visual cortex and responses in vision has not been clarified enough, both flexibility for stimulation strategies and timewise precision of stimulation are required for in-vivo experiments. In the proposed stimulation controller, a 16-bit microprocessor is utilized for various stimulation strategies, and dedicated control signal generator for electrodes runs in parallel with the microprocessor. The proposed stimulation controller generates stimulations in temporal resolution of 1 mu s and spatio resolution up to 4 096 stimulation sites. Evaluation with an FPGA demonstrates the programmability of its implementation.