VLSI architecture of leading eigenvector generation for on-chip principal component analysis spike sorting system

On-chip spike detection and principal component analysis (PCA) sorting hardware in an integrated multi-channel neural recording system is highly desired to ease the bandwidth bottleneck from high-density microelectrode array implanted in the cortex. In this paper, we propose the first leading eigenvector generator, the key hardware module of PCA, to enable the whole framework. Based on the iterative eigenvector distilling algorithm, the proposed flipped structure enables the low cost and low power implementation by discarding the division and square root hardware units. Further, the proposed adaptive level shifting scheme optimizes the accuracy and area trade off by dynamically increasing the quantization parameter according to the signal level.With the specification of four principal components/channel, 32 samples/spike, and nine bits/sample, the proposed hardware can train 312 channels per minute with 1MHz operation frequency. 0.13 mm² silicon area and 282µW power consumption are required in 90 nm 1P9M CMOS process.