Multichannel wireless cortical recording: circuits, system design and assembly challenges

We present in this paper advanced mixed signal circuits and systems techniques dedicated for wireless multichannel cortical recording devices. These design techniques enable minimum power consumption and integration area of building blocks, which make them well suited for implantable devices including a large number of channels. Also, to address the overwhelming amount of data generated by these systems, an on-chip event detection technique is proposed for data reduction. We show that this method can increase the number of channels available in wireless implantable acquisition systems, currently limited by RF data link transfer rates. Tradeoffs between power, area and data loss for worst case are discussed.