An Event-Driven SoC for Neural Recording

Abstract

This paper presents a novel 64-channel ultra-low power/low noise neural recording System-on-Chip (SoC) featuring a highly reconfigurable Analogue Front-End (AFE) and block-selectable data-driven output. This allows a tunable bandwidth/sampling rate for extracting Local Field Potentials (LFPs) and/or Extracellular Action Potentials (EAPs). Realtime spike detection utilises a dual polarity simple threshold to enable an event driven output for neural spikes (16-sample window). The 64-channels are organised into 16 sets of 4-channel recording blocks, with each block having a dedicated 10-bit SAR ADC that is time division multiplexed among the 4 channels. Each channel can be individually powered down and configured for bandwidth, gain and detection threshold. The output can thus combine continuous-streaming and event-driven data packets with the system configured as SPI slave. The SoC is implemented in a commercially-available 0.35u m CMOS technology occupying a silicon area of 19.1mm^2 (0.3mm^2 gross per channel) and requiring 32uW/channel power consumption (AFE only).