A Power-Efficient Compressive Sensing Platform for Cortical Implants

Smart and miniaturized implantable microsystems with diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities are becoming increasingly important for patients suffering from neurological disorders such as epilepsy. Recent developments in microfabrication technology have provided new insights into seizure generation at an unprecedented spatial scale. Based on these findings, designing powerful acquisition systems capable of probing the wide-range spatiotemporal activities within the brain holds a great promise to improve the quality of life of epileptic patients. As a major technological barrier, the high overall data rate of digitized neural signals recorded by dense electrode arrays can drastically increase the power consumption of the wireless transmission module. Consequently, extensive system-level design improvement is needed to meet the requirements of the implantable device, while preserving the high-resolution monitoring capability. In this context, low-power circuit and system design techniques for data compression and seizure detection in multichannel cortical implants are presented. The first fully-integrated circuit that addresses the multichannel compressed-domain feature extraction is proposed, consuming sub-μ W of power within an effective area of 250μm×250μm per channel.