A Tunable Biquad Switched-Capacitor Amplifier-Filter for Neural Recording

With the emerging interest in local field potentials (LFPs) as input signals for brain-machine interfaces, there is a need for integrated circuits capable of amplifying spikes and LFPs. A two-stage complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) amplifier-filter has been implemented with 0.18-μm CMOS for simultaneous, multimodal recording of extracellular unit spikes and LFPs. For the frequency tuning and the reduction of the 1/f noise, it employs a switched-capacitor technique. The filter bandwidth is reconfigurable by using a different sampling clock frequency. The prototype amplifier has gains of 19.1 dB and 37.5 dB for low-pass only filter and cascaded filter, respectively. With a 100-kHz sampling frequency, the equivalent input noise spectral density is 38.8 nV/√Hz while the total power consumption is 69 μW with a 1.6-V supply, including clock generation and biasing occupying an area of 44 × 148 μm².