Low-Power Circuits for Brain–Machine Interfaces

This paper presents work on ultra-low-power circuits for brain–machine interfaces with applications for paralysis prosthetics, stroke, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, prosthetics for the blind, and experimental neuroscience systems. The circuits include a micropower neural amplifier with adaptive power biasing for use in multi-electrode arrays; an analog linear decoding and learning architecture for data compression; low-power radio-frequency (RF) impedance-modulation circuits for data telemetry that minimize power consumption of implanted systems in the body; a wireless link for efficient power transfer; mixed-signal system integration for efficiency, robustness, and programmability; and circuits for wireless stimulation of neurons with power-conserving sleep modes and awake modes. Experimental results from chips that have stimulated and recorded from neurons in the zebra finch brain and results from RF power-link, RF data-link, electrode-recording and electrode-stimulating systems are presented. Simulations of analog learning circuits that have successfully decoded prerecorded neural signals from a monkey brain are also presented.