Wireless Photometry Prototype for Tri-Color Excitation and Multi-Region Recording

A 33nW Fully Autonomous SoC With Distributed Cooperative Energy Harvesting and Multi-Chip Power Management for mm-Scale System-in-Fiber

This article presents a fully autonomous system-on-chip (SoC) that can be distributed along a fiber strand, capable of simultaneously harvesting energy, cooperatively scaling performance, sharing power, and booting-up with other in-fiber SoCs for ultra-low-power (ULP) sensing applications. Utilizing a custom switched capacitor energy harvesting and power management unit (EHPMU), the SoC can efficiently redistribute and reuse harvested energy along the fiber. Integrated on-chip, the ULP RISC-V digital core and temperature sensor enable energy-efficient sensing and computation at nanowatt power levels. A dedicated ripple boot-up and cooperative dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) further optimize the operation and physical size of the system. Fabricated in 65 nm, measurement results show that the proposed SoC achieves 33 nW power consumption for the whole chip under 92 Lux lighting condition and can reduce control power down to 2.7 nW for the EHPMU. With the proposed power sharing and cooperative DVFS techniques, the SoC reduces the illuminance needed to stay alive by >7× down to 12 Lux. Integrated into a mm-scale polymer fiber, our SoC demonstrates the feasibility of fully autonomous and ULP on-body sensing systems in resource-constrained fiber environments.

Fused fiber couplers for fiber photometry

In this issue of Cell Reports Methods, Formozov et al. present an innovative fiber photometry system that uses a fused fiber coupler (FFC) instead of a dichroic mirror to split the excitation and emission light. The FFC-based photometry system is highly flexible and can be easily reconfigured to record from different biosensors.