A micro-power neural spike detector and feature extractor in .13μm CMOS

We present a fully-integrated system for the detection and characterization of action potentials observed in extracellular neural recordings. The circuit includes an analog implementation of the nonlinear energy operator for spike detection. The minimum and maximum value of detected spikes are captured by peak detectors and digitized by an on-chip successive approximation ADC to provide a compact description of the spike waveform. The circuit is implemented in a .13 mum CMOS process. It occupies .17 mm² of chip area and consumes 1 muW from a 1 V supply.