A Hardware-Efficient Scalable Spike Sorting Neural Signal Processor Module for Implantable High-Channel-Count Brain Machine Interfaces.

Next-generation brain machine interfaces demand a high-channel-count neural recording system to wirelessly monitor activities of thousands of neurons. A hardware efficient neural signal processor (NSP) is greatly desirable to ease the data bandwidth bottleneck for a fully implantable wireless neural recording system. This paper demonstrates a complete multichannel spike sorting NSP module that incorporates all of the necessary spike detector, feature extractor, and spike classifier blocks. To meet high-channel-count and implantability demands, each block was designed to be highly hardware efficient and scalable while sharing resources efficiently among multiple channels. To process multiple channels in parallel, scalability analysis was performed, and the utilization of each block was optimized according to its input data statistics and the power, area and/or speed of each block. Based on this analysis, a prototype 32-channel spike sorting NSP scalable module was designed and tested on an FPGA using synthesized datasets over a wide range of signal to noise ratios. The design was mapped to 130 nm CMOS to achieve 0.75 μW power and 0.023 mm2 area consumptions per channel based on post synthesis simulation results, which permits scalability of digital processing to 690 channels on a 4×4 mm2 electrode array.