Engineering hope with biomimetic microelectronic systems

This paper focuses on biomimetic systems for building advanced neuroscience and neuroprosthetics platform with closed-loop control mechanisms. Works on neural implants consist of four major functional blocks of stimulation, recording, processing, and wireless communication, each of which has different challenges to be overcome. On-chip integration of these fundamental blocks with low power requirements inevitably needs multi-voltage and multi-signal design techniques. Combining these techniques with the stated-of-art high voltage process, high compliance voltage for miniaturized nerve/neuromuscular stimulators can be achieved. An understanding of the noise sources and their contributions within neural interface provides a better way to optimize the performance of the recording function. On chip signal processing techniques for noise reduction, feature extraction, and data classification facilitates decision-making and closed-loop execution. Power and data telemetry links enable implanted electronic to operate wirelessly, avoiding large size battery or percutaneous physical links that are prone to damage.