Distributed mixed signal demultiplexer for electrocorticography electrodes

Abstract

This work presents a novel architecture, exemplified for electrophysiological applications like ECoG that can be used to detect Epilepsy. The new ECoG is based on a mixed analog-digital architecture (Pulse Amplitude Modulation PAM), that allows the use of thousands of electrodes for recording. Whilst the increased number of electrodes helps to refine the spatial resolution of the medical application, the transmission of the signals from the electrodes to an external analysing device appears to be a bottleneck. To overcoming this, our work presents a hardware architecture and corresponding protocol for a mixed architecture that improves the information density between channels and their signal-to-noise ratio. This is shown by the correlation between the input and the transmitted signals in comparison to a classical digital transmission (Pulse Code Modulation PCM) system. We show in this work that it is possible to transmit the signals of 10 channels with a analog-digital architecture with the same quality of a full digital architecture.