Sensing and actuating electrophysiological activity on brain tissue and neuronal cultures with a high-density CMOS-MEA

Multielectrode arrays (MEAs) for electrophysiological studies in neuroscience can nowadays be realized with Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology to provide large active areas with several thousands of simultaneously recording microelectrodes and electrode densities with inter-electrode separations approaching cellular sizes. This provides spatial and temporal resolutions to literally image electrophysiological activity propagations. Here, we focus on the achieved sensing capabilities of a 64×64 electrode array as well as on the actuation performances of a novel CMOS-chip integrating 16 electrodes for electrical stimulation. We report and discuss our recent results obtained from neuronal cell cultures, brain slices and mouse retina preparations.