Low noise and low cost neural amplifiers

Extracellular neural signal acquisition requires low noise, high gain, low power, and low cost amplifiers. This paper presents amplifiers with a simple architecture that ensures a good compromise among these characteristics. We present three amplifiers based on the same architecture, in which the first stage is a differential pair, respectively based on HBT, NMOS or PMOS transistors. The HBT-based solution presents the lowest intrinsic noise, followed by the NMOS solution. We use Monte Carlo simulation to validate the robustness of amplifiers´ characteristics of technological dispersions.