128-channel Fully Integrated Wireless Neural Recording IC

This talk describes a fully integrated neural recording IC with on-the-fly spike sorting and wireless telemetry. The chip consists of eight 16channel front-end blocks each consisting of amplifiers, multiplexer and ADC, data serializing circuits, DSP for on-the-fly spike sorting, digital MUX, encoder, UWB transmitter, and on-chip bias generators. The analog front end is programmable for gain, low and high cut off frequencies, which makes the recording system versatile for various biopotentials. Noise shaping in digital domain eliminates frequent training thus enabling the first on-chip spike feature extraction. Ultrawide band (UWB) telemetry is used to achieve 90Mbps allowing data transmission of 128 channels with a low power UWB transmitter. The 8.8 x 7.2mm IC in 0.35μm CMOS consumes only 6mW due to sequential turn-on architecture that selectively turns off power in the front end analog blocks.