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A Fully-Differential Chopper Capacitively-Coupled Amplifier with High Input Impedance for Closed-Loop Neural Recording

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Abstract

In this paper, a chopper capacitively-coupled instrumentation amplifier (CCIA) with high input impedance and low input-referred noise is presented for closed-loop neural recording. A recycling folded-cascode amplifier with an inherent common-mode feedback (CMFB) circuit is proposed as the first stage to tolerate large common-mode and differential in-band artifacts without any extra circuit since this structure has a large input common-mode range. Also, this structure can improve the noise efficiency factor (NEF) due to the smaller current consumption with the same gain and bandwidth than the conventional folded-cascode amplifier. The fully-differential common-source amplifier is used as the second stage for achieving a large output signal swing. Hence, the proposed chopper CCIA has a small total harmonic distortion (THD). The proposed pseudo resistor has a large amount and enough THD with less sensitivity to the PVT variations. It has made the small low cut-off frequency in the proposed chopper CCIA by using small capacitors in the DC servo-loop. Therefore, the total value of the on-chip capacitors is reduced. By reducing the low cut-off frequency in chopper CCIA, the positive feedback loop increases the input impedance at a low frequency more than the previous works using the positive feedback loop, despite the presence of DC servo-loop in the chopper CCIA. The proposed neural recording amplifier has been simulated with Cadence using TSMC 180 nm CMOS process with a 1.8 V power supply.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Integrated Circuits Design Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), 424 Hafez Ave., Tehran, Iran

    Fatemeh Ansari & Mohammad Yavari

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  1. Fatemeh Ansari
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  2. Mohammad Yavari
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Correspondence to Mohammad Yavari.

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Ansari, F., Yavari, M. A Fully-Differential Chopper Capacitively-Coupled Amplifier with High Input Impedance for Closed-Loop Neural Recording. Circuits Syst Signal Process 41, 3679–3705 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-022-01970-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-022-01970-3

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