A hardware design for in-brain neural spike sorting

Neural spike sorting is used to classify neural spike signals based on neuron type and so is an essential step in decoding brain signals. Because of its computational complexity, spike sorting is generally carried out offline or, at least, using a transmitted signal. In contrast, in-brain spike sorting would reduce the data that needs to be transmitted by orders of magnitude with a corresponding reduction in transmission power. This would enable real-time wireless neural recordings. In this paper, we design and characterize a hardware prototype for in-brain spike sorting. Our design is able to reduce the wireless transmission power by a factor of over 200 over direct transmission. Also, compared with the current state-of-the-art, our design increases the sorting accuracy from 75% to 93% while remaining within hard constraints for power, power density, and real-time processing.