EMBEDDED ELECTRONIC PLATFORMS FOR BIO-INSPIRED COMPUTING

Biosignal processing is an area of critical importance in neurological medicine. The probe technology used to gather in situ data from neurons has advanced leaps and bounds in the past decade, but the technology required to process this vast amount of data lags behind. The signals produced by the neurons are extremely small and are difficult to distinguish from noise. In addition to this, a probe will detect pulses from multiple neurons, which must be grouped by shape to determine which neuron is responsible for which spike. To remedy this issue, we intend to design a new type of analogue circuit that conducts most of the sorting in the pre-processing stage. The purpose of this research is to produce such a system using memristive devices. Memristors are a type of passive electrical circuit element that change their resistive state dependent on the amount of charge that has flowed through them. Applying an amplified voltage spike from a neural probe results in a change in resistance of the memristor that can be measured to both detect the spike and determine the group to which that spike belongs. In addition to this method, this project will also investigate two other methods for improving upon existing detection methods using memristors as tuning devices.