A Streaming PCA VLSI Chip for Neural Data Compression

IEEE Trans Biomed Circuits Syst. 2017 Dec;11(6):1290-1302. doi: 10.1109/TBCAS.2017.2717281. Epub 2017 Aug 14.

Abstract

Neural recording system miniaturization and integration with low-power wireless technologies require compressing neural data before transmission. Feature extraction is a procedure to represent data in a low-dimensional space; its integration into a recording chip can be an efficient approach to compress neural data. In this paper, we propose a streaming principal component analysis algorithm and its microchip implementation to compress multichannel local field potential (LFP) and spike data. The circuits have been designed in a 65-nm CMOS technology and occupy a silicon area of 0.06 mm. Throughout the experiments, the chip compresses LFPs by 10 at the expense of as low as 1% reconstruction errors and 144-nW/channel power consumption; for spikes, the achieved compression ratio is 25 with 8% reconstruction errors and 3.05-W/channel power consumption. In addition, the algorithm and its hardware architecture can swiftly adapt to nonstationary spiking activities, which enables efficient hardware sharing among multiple channels to support a high-channel count recorder.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Action Potentials / physiology
  • Algorithms
  • Data Compression / methods*
  • Humans
  • Neurons / physiology
  • Principal Component Analysis
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Wireless Technology / instrumentation