An Intracortical Wireless Bidirectional Brain-Computer Interface with High Data Density

In this work, we introduce a compact, bidirectional, wireless intracortical Brain-Computer Interface (iBCI) system. The system incorporates various functionalities, including stimulation, high sampling rate (30 kS/s) recording, online spike detection and signal compression, wireless power transfer, and communication. Specifically, to optimize data bandwidth utilization and ensure scalability for an increased number of channels, an efficient spike detection operator and an algorithm for signal compression are implemented on the chip. In addition, the proposed system supports customizable configuration of in total 16 recording and stimulation channels in a flexible way. The system’s functionalities and performance have been validated by acquiring both simulated signals and real neural signals in rats. Overall, this design takes an important step towards forming a compact system using low-cost components for closed-loop BCI applications.