Control of Acoustic Signal Processing in Physiological Experiments Using PSoCs

Physiological investigations of the structure and function of the normal auditory system are technologically demanding, requiring electronic devices for generating and processing acoustic signals and for detecting, capturing and processing neural responses. Controllers for such custom electronic devices in physiological laboratories must be robust, configurable and embed-able. Recent advances in embedded systems have provided such a flexible, low-cost and reconfigurable technology: the programmable system-on-chip (PSoC), which integrates a microcontroller with programmable analogue and digital functions in a single chip. This makes it an ideal technology to be embedded in experimental equipment to allow flexible computer control. Using PSoC technology it is possible for a single design of circuit board and firmware to control multiple applications such as attenuation, filtering and amplification. Application programs to control devices, log and process data can be developed using various software environments. In the current application, a single driver was developed for multiple software environments such as Matlab, BrainWare or Visual Studio. Here we describe an instantiation of an embedded PSoC based hardware solution with appropriate firmware that provides full accurate and precise control of a very complex and sophisticated auditory physiological laboratory that includes attenuators, low-pass filters and amplifiers.