A Scalable 128-Channel, Time-Multiplexed Potentiostat for Parallel Electrochemical Experiments

Electrochemical experiments like chronoamperometry or cyclic voltammetry (CV) are essential in the research for novel bioelectrochemical systems. These experiments, executed by a potentiostat, are time-consuming which hinders research progression. To speed up those experiments, this work presents a potentiostat with 128 individual parallel stimulation and sensing channels. A channel architecture exploiting time division multiplexing is developed to minimize the hardware cost and area. Potential control is done in the digital domain using 128 individual Linear Quadratic Integral (LQI) controllers. The 128-channel potentiostat is implemented with Printed Circuit Board (PCB) technology and has $16 {\times }$ more channels than the state of the art low-cost potentiostats with a $4 {\times }$ lower cost-per-channel (5 $) and a $4 {\times }$ lower area-per-channel (${93}\,mm^{2}$ ). Using parallelism, chronoamperometry experiments can be done ${128\times }$ faster, while a conventional ${1}\, mV\,s^{-1}$ -CV can be done $72\,\, {\times }$ faster by sampling instead of voltage sweeping.