A multichannel analog front-end for recording neural electrical signals

Recent work in the field of neurophysiology has demonstrated that it is possible to reveal the nature of “memory” and “thinking” which helps to understand how brain works, by means of observing the firing characteristic of action potentials (AP) and the exchange pattern of signals between neurons. To address these needs, we have developed a prototype of a fully integrated circuit for neural recording on a Micro-Electrode Array (MEA). In this scheme, the MEA is composed by 64 electrodes and 2 reference electrodes. The proposed integrated circuit has an area of 5×5 mm², including 8 recording channels. Each channel can operate independently to execute amplifying, filtering, etc. The circuits are designed and simulated in a standard 0.5μm CMOS technology. According to the simulation results, this chip is able to record AP signal from neurons.