Towards a 1.1 mm 2 free-floating wireless implantable neural recording SoC

A 1.1 mm2 sized free-floating wireless implantable neural recording (FF-WINeR) system-on-a-chip (SOC) is designed and tested in vitro toward developing stand-alone neural probes in the form of small untethered pushpins (1 mm3) to be distributed across the areas of interest in the brain. Pre-recorded single unit activity (SUA) from neurons injected in saline solution are recorded through the probe single tungsten electrode, amplified by a low noise amplifier (LNA) with 53 dB gain, and filtered within 0.1–12 kHz band. The amplified SUA signals are digitized by a 10 bits voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) based analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and transmitted to an external data receiver (Rx) through an inductive link shared for power transmission using an impulse radio (IR)-based near-field uplink data telemetry at 800 kbps data rate and <0.3 mW power budget.