D Tsai, E John, T Chari, R Yuste, K L Shepard, “High–channel–count, high–density micro- electrode array for closed–loop investigation of neuronal networks,” Proceedings of the 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS, 2015

We present a system for large-scale electrophysiological recording and stimulation of neural tissue with a planar topology. The recording system has 65,536 electrodes arranged in a 256 x 256 grid, with 25.5 µm pitch, and covering an area approximately 42.6 mm2 . The recording chain has 8.66 µV rms input-referred noise over a 100 ~ 10k Hz bandwidth while providing up to 66 dB of voltage gain. When recording from all electrodes in the array, it is capable of 10- kHz sampling per electrode. All electrodes can also perform patterned electrical microstimulation. The system produces ~ 1 GB/s of data when recording from the full array. To handle, store, and perform nearly real-time analyses of this large data stream, we developed a framework based around Xilinx FPGAs, Intel x86 CPUs and the NVIDIA Streaming Multiprocessors to interface with the electrode array.