This technology is a multichannel data acquisition strategy that eliminates the need for per-channel filters, allowing for massive scale-up of channel count and density without loss of signal-to-noise ratio.
Certain applications, such as recording electrophysiological signals from neurons or cardiac cells, often require collecting information from a large number of sources within a short period of time. These data acquisition tools must collect signals from as many sources as possible using as many channels as possible. Due to space limitations and power budget constraints, current electronic recording tools take advantage of time-division multiplexing methods to share a single energy-expensive signal processing circuit among multiple recording channels. However, to reduce noise, these methods require low-pass filters with large capacitors, which demand significant chip area.
This technology describes a multichannel acquisition method that eliminates the need for large area capacitors. This allows for massive scale-up of channel density without trading off noise penalty. The final recorded signal is a collection of continuous-time signal segments acquired from different channels that are stitched together. This final continuous-time signal is sampled, then extracted back into its constituent signal segments that were recorded from each channel. As each channel is recorded periodically, the extracted signal segment contains missing values for the portion of the signal when the multiplexer was recording a signal from a different channel. These missing values are statistically interpolated to recover the complete signal for each channel. This technology enables the implementation of high performing multichannel data acquisition systems with tight space and power budget constraints.
Patent Pending
IR CU17180
Licensing Contact: Greg Maskel