A multi-channel fully differential programmable integrated circuit for neural recording application

A multi-channel, fully differential programmable chip for neural recording application is presented. The integrated circuit incorporates eight neural recording amplifiers with tunable bandwidth and gain, eight 4th-order Bessel switch capacitor filters, an 8-to-1 analog time-division multiplexer, a fully differential successive approximation register analog-to-digital converter (SAR ADC), and a serial peripheral interface for communication. The neural recording amplifier presents a programmable gain from 53 dB to 68 dB, a tunable low cut-off frequency from 0.1 Hz to 300 Hz, and 3.77 mu V-rms input-referred noise over a 5 kHz bandwidth. The SAR ADC digitizes signals at maximum sampling rate of 20 kS/s per channel and achieves an ENOB of 7.4. The integrated circuit is designed and fabricated in 0.18-mu m CMOS mix-signal process. We successfully performed a multi-channel in-vivo recording experiment from a rat cortex using the neural recording chip.