A Sub-μW Reconfigurable Front-End for Invasive Neural Recording That Exploits the Spectral Characteristics of the Wideband Neural Signal

This paper presents a sub- mu W ac-coupled reconfigurable front-end for invasive wideband neural signal recording. The proposed topology embeds filtering capabilities enabling the selection of different frequency bands inside the neural signal spectrum. Power consumption is optimized by defining specific noise targets for each sub-band. These targets take into account the spectral characteristics of wideband neural signals: local field potentials (LFP) exhibit l/f(x) magnitude scaling while action potentials (AP) show uniform magnitude across frequency. Additionally, noise targets also consider electrode noise and the spectral distribution of noise sources in the circuit. An experimentally verified prototype designed in a standard 180 nm CMOS process draws 815 nW from a 1 V supply. The front-end is able to select among four different frequency bands (modes) up to 5 kHz. The measured input-referred spot-noise at 500 Hz in the LFP mode (1 Hz - 700 Hz) is 55 nV/root Hz while the integrated noise in the AP mode (200 Hz - 5 kHz) is 4.1 mu Vrms. The proposed front-end achieves sub-mu W operation without penalizing other specifications such as input swing, common-mode or power-supply rejection ratios. It reduces the power consumption of neural front-ends with spectral selectivity by 6.1x and, compared with conventional wideband front-ends, it obtains a reduction of 2.5x.