An Event-Based Neural Compressive Telemetry With >11x Loss-Less Data Reduction for High-Bandwidth Intracortical Brain Computer Interfaces

Abstract

Intracortical brain-computer interfaces offer superior spatial and temporal resolutions, but face challenges as the increasing number of recording channels introduces high amounts of data to be transferred. This requires power-hungry data serialization and telemetry, leading to potential tissue damage risks. To address this challenge, this paper introduces an event-based neural compressive telemetry (NCT) consisting of 8 channel-rotating Delta-ADCs, an event-driven serializer supporting a proposed ternary address event representation protocol, and an event-based LVDS driver. Leveraging a high sparsity of extracellular spikes and high spatial correlation of the high-density recordings, the proposed NCT achieves a compression ratio of >11.4x, while consumes only 1 mu W per channel, which is 127x more efficient than state of the art. The NCT well preserves the spike waveform fidelity, and has a low normalized RMS error <23% even with a spike amplitude down to only 31 <mu>V.