Design of an adaptive interference reduction system for nerve-cuff electrode recording

This paper describes the design of an adaptive control system for recording neural signals from tripolar cuff electrodes. The control system is based on an adaptive version of the true-tripole amplifier configuration and was developed to compensate for possible errors in the cuff electrode balance by continuously adjusting the gains of the two differential amplifiers. Thus, in the presence of cuff imbalance, the output signal-to-interference ratio is expected to be significantly increased, in turn reducing the requirement for post-filtering to reasonable levels and resulting in a system which is fully implantable. A realization in 0.8-μm CMOS technology is described and simulated and preliminary measured results are presented. Gain control is achieved by means of current-mode feedback and many of the system blocks operate in the current-mode domain. The chip has a core area of 0.4 mm² and dissipates 3 mW from ± 2.5V power supplies. Measurements indicate that the adaptive control system is expected to be capable of compensating for up to ±5% errors in the tripolar cuff electrode balance.