A low power, low noise amplifier for neural signal amplification in SCL 180nm

A Low Power, Low Noise Neural Amplifier is designed in this paper. A Folded Cascode Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA) with self-biased cascode current mirror load is used. Current Scaling and other low noise design techniques are employed to achieve the low input referred noise and power dissipation. The amplifiers bandwidth can be adjusted to record either local field potentials or neural spikes by controlling the bias current. Simulations were performed in Cadence Virtuoso using SCL 180nm technology parameters. Simulation results indicated that the proposed Neural Amplifier showed low noise, low power, sufficiently high gain and a very high bandwidth of around 9 KHz.