Towards a Bionic Neural Link for Implantable Prosthetics

Abstract

This paper presents a biologically-inspired 'silicon neural link', encompassing a neurochemical sensor array, an asynchronous artificial-neural bus and an interleaved biphasic stimulus generator. The proposed system is intended for neuroprosthetic application; employing an array of ISFET-based spiking neurons to convey measured neuronal data across a damaged neural pathway to a target stimulation site. A 48 dB dynamic range is achieved by encoding the neural signal in the time-domain, using accumulating address-events to modulate the biphasic waveform. The electrical stimulation is delivered via a bipolar electrode configuration in a continuous interleave sampling strategy. This has been implemented in a commercially available 035mum CMOS technology.