Impedance and Noise Characterizations of Utah and Microwire Electrode Arrays
- Resource Type
- Periodical
- Authors
- Gardner, A.T.; Strathman, H.J.; Warren, D.J.; Walker, R.M.
- Source
- IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology IEEE J. Electromagn. RF Microw. Med. Biol. Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology, IEEE Journal of. 2(4):234-241 Dec, 2018
- Subject
- Bioengineering
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
Microelectrodes
Impedance
Noise measurement
Frequency measurement
Brain-computer interfaces
In vitro
In vivo
Electrode characterization
microwire
neural amplifier
neural interface
BCI
Tucker-Davis Technologies (TDT)
Utah Electrode Array (UEA)
- Language
- ISSN
- 2469-7249
2469-7257
This paper presents an in-depth noise and impedance characterization of two of the most widely used microelectrode arrays (the Utah Electrode Array (UEA) and the Tucker-Davis Technologies (TDT) Microwire Array) and provides quantitative analysis of how properties change when implanted in rodent cortex. Custom low-noise circuits and de-embedding methods were designed to acquire ${\rm{nV}}/\sqrt {{\rm{Hz}}} $ noise power spectral densities from high-impedance electrodes. A total of 80 electrodes were implanted across five rats and measured under deep anesthesia, demonstrating a 1.5× to 3× increase in noise and 2.25× to 9× in impedance compared to in vitro measurements. Low-frequency biological noise was also observed and studied through postmortem measurements. These results are informative for designing neural interfacing systems for both neuroscience and medical applications.