Cell and brain interfacing has gained a lot of interest in recent years. Thanks to advancements in technology scaling, current state-of-the-art systems are able to record the electrical activity down to single neuron resolution from several hundreds of recordings sites at the same time. This is a critical tool for neuroscientist to help understand how our brain operates. In recent years also stimulation has gained a lot of interest. Neural stimulation serves a lot of potential applications like restoring bodily functions for disabled people, suppressing pain, brain-computer-interfaces and Parkinson’s disease. This tutorial will focus on the circuit techniques and technologies to enable such high-density neural recording and stimulation. It will go from high-level system design aspects, to processing/technology aspects (electrodes) and will end with specific circuit design techniques.

Biography:

Nick Van Helleputte received the MS degree in electrical engineering in 2004 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He received his Ph.D. degree from the same institute in 2009 (MICAS research group). His PhD research focused on low-power ultra-wide-band analog front-end receivers for ranging applications. He joined imec in 2009 as an Analog R&D Design Engineer. He is currently team leader of the biomedical circuits and systems team. His research focus is on ultra-low-power circuits for biomedical applications. He has been involved in analog and mixed-signal ASIC design for wearable and implantable healthcare applications. Nick is an IEEE member and served on the technical program committee of VLSI circuits symposium and ISSCC.

Biography: