Learning-based near-optimal area-power trade-offs in hardware design for neural signal acquisition

Wireless implantable devices capable of monitoring the electrical activity of the brain are becoming an important tool for understanding and potentially treating mental diseases such as epilepsy and depression. While such devices exist, it is still necessary to address several challenges to make them more practical in terms of area and power dissipation. In this work, we apply Learning Based Compressive Sub-sampling (LBCS) to tackle the power and area trade-offs in neural wireless devices. To this end, we propose a low-power and area-efficient system for neural signal acquisition which yields state-of-art compression rates up to 64× with high reconstruction quality, as demonstrated on two human iEEG datasets. This new fully digital architecture handles one neural acquisition channel, with an area of 210 × 210μm in 90nm CMOS technology, and a power dissipation of only 1μW.