32-channel ultra-low-noise arbitrary signal generation platform for biopotential emulation

Abstract

This paper presents a multichannel, ultra-low-noise arbitrary signal generation platform for emulating a wide range of different biopotential signals (e.g. ECG, EEG, etc). This is intended for use in the test, measurement and demonstration of bioinstrumentation and medical devices that interface to electrode inputs. The system is organized in 3 key blocks for generating, processing and converting the digital data into a parallel high performance analogue output. These blocks consist of: (1) a Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi3) board; (2) a custom Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board with low-power IGLOO Nano device; and (3) analogue board including the Digital-to-Analogue Converters (DACs) and output circuits. By implementing the system this way, good isolation can be achieved between the different power and signal domains. This mixed-signal architecture takes in a high bitrate SDIO (Secure Digital Input Output) stream, recodes and packetizes this to drive two multichannel DACs, with parallel analogue outputs that are then attenuated and filtered. The system achieves 32-parallel output channels each sampled at 48kS/s, with a 10kHz bandwidth, 110dB dynamic range and uV-level output noise.