Multi-Chip High-Density Microelectrode System for Electrogenic-Cell Recording and Stimulation

An electrogenic-cell-activity monitoring system comprising five high-density CMOS-based microelectrode arrays is presented. Each microelectrode array features 11´016 metal electrodes and 126 on-chip channels for recording and stimulation of the cells. The electrodes are sampled at 20 kHz, and the signals are converted to the digital domain using an 8-bit AD converter. Further data processing is implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), which provides realtime feedback and sends the essential information to a PC for storage, visualization and further processing. The system enables to continuously measure at up to 630 electrodes on 5 different chips, it performs loss-less data compression to 15%-50% of the original size and it concurrently detects the spikes generated by the cells.