A multi-channel low-power system-on-chip for single-unit recording and narrowband wireless transmission of neural signal

This paper reports a multi-channel neural recording system-on-chip (SoC) with digital data compression and wireless telemetry. The circuit consists of a 16 amplifiers, an analog time division multiplexer, an 8-bit SAR AD converter, a digital signal processor (DSP) and a wireless narrowband 400-MHz binary FSK transmitter. Even though only 16 amplifiers are present in our current die version, the whole system is designed to work with 64 channels demonstrating the feasibility of a digital processing and narrowband wireless transmission of 64 neural recording channels. A digital data compression, based on the detection of action potentials and storage of correspondent waveforms, allows the use of a 1.25-Mbit/s binary FSK wireless transmission. This moderate bit-rate and a low frequency deviation, Manchester-coded modulation are crucial for exploiting a narrowband wireless link and an efficient embeddable antenna. The chip is realized in a 0.35-μm CMOS process with a power consumption of 105 μW per channel (269 μW per channel with an extended transmission range of 4 m) and an area of 3.1 × 2.7 mm². The transmitted signal is captured by a digital TV tuner and demodulated by a wideband phase-locked loop (PLL), and then sent to a PC via an FPGA module. The system has been tested for electrical specifications and its functionality verified in in-vivo neural recording experiments.