Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuit Design

Analog and mixed-signal circuit design for biomedical engineering is concerned with building the hardware that translates biological signals — electrical activity in neurons, temperature shifts in tissue, chemical gradients at cell membranes — into digital data that computers can analyze. Because these circuits must operate inside or close to the body, engineers work under severe constraints: power budgets measured in microwatts, noise floors that must sit below the microvolt-scale signals being recorded, and fabrication in CMOS processes that can be manufactured at scale. A central challenge is that the fundamental trade-offs between noise, bandwidth, and power consumption become especially punishing at these extremes, so techniques like delta-sigma modulation, chopper stabilization, and dynamic element matching are continuously refined to extract more performance from less energy. Open questions include how to achieve reliable, long-term implant operation as electrodes degrade and tissue responses change, and how to integrate sufficient on-chip signal processing so that raw data volumes — particularly from large-scale neural recording arrays — can be compressed before wireless transmission.

Works

84,736

Total citations

785,259

Keywords

CMOSLow-PowerNeural RecordingADCVoltage ReferenceLow-Noise Amplifier