The Design of Wireless Interfaces to the Brain

Reid R. Harrison
University of Utah

Monday, January 25, 2010 at 1:00PM
54-134 Engineering IV Building
Refreshments Served

Abstract: The ability to monitor the simultaneous electrical activity of multiple neurons in the brain enables a wide range of scientific and medical endeavors. Recent efforts to merge miniature multielectrode neural recording arrays with integrated electronics have revealed significant circuit design challenges. Weak neural signals must be amplified and filtered using low-noise circuits placed close to the electrodes themselves, but power dissipation must strictly be limited to prevent tissue damage due to local heating. In modern recording systems with 100 or more electrodes, raw data rates exceed 10 Mb/s. Digitizing and transmitting information at such high rates is often prohibitive due to power limits, so data reduction must be performed in the implanted device.

In this talk, I will present integrated circuits and design techniques that address the twin problems of neural signal amplification and data reduction for this severely size- and power-limited application. I will show neural signals acquired from both nerve and cortex using the 100-channel Utah Integrated Neural Interface (INI), which operates with wireless power, command, and telemetry links.

Bio: Reid R. Harrison received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida in 1994 and the Ph.D. degree in Computation and Neural Systems from Caltech in 2000.

He joined the University of Utah in 2000, where he is now an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Bioengineering. His research interests include low-power analog and mixed-signal CMOS circuit design, and integrated electronics for neural interfaces and other biomedical devices.

Dr. Harrison received the National Science Foundation Career Award in 2002. In 2006 he received the Jack Raper Award for Outstanding Technology Directions Paper from the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). He has served on the technical program committees of ISSCC and the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS). In 2003, he founded Intan Technologies, LLC, to commercialize integrated circuits for neural recording and stimulation applications.