Intan Technologies, LLC: low-noise amplifier microchips for electrophysiology, EKG, EMG, EEG, ECoG, and neural recording headstages and bio instrumentation
RHD2000 series electrophysiology chips in an 8mm x 8mm plastic QFN package and in bare die form.
RHD2000 vs. RHA2000 comparison
RHD2000 Rhythm USB/FPGA interface
QFN device moisture sensitivity guide
Application note: Interfacing a microphone to Intan amplifier chips
RHD2000 parts library for PCB design, in Eagle PCB format
Bond pad diagrams for RHD2000 bare die
Introduction to Intan amplifier chips
RHD2000 series digital electrophysiology interface chips
The new RHD2000 series digital electrophysiology interface chips are complete low-power biosignal acquisition systems. These patent-pending devices contain banks of low-noise amplifiers with programmable bandwidths and are suitable for a wide variety of biopotential monitoring and recording applications.
Innovative circuit architecture combines amplifiers, reconfigurable analog and digital filters, a 16-bit ADC, and a multi-frequency electrode impedance measurement module onto a single silicon chip. Up to 32 recording electrodes are connected directly to one side of the chip, and digital data exits the other side on a standard SPI bus.
The upper and lower bandwidths of the amplifiers may be dynamically programmed by means of internal registers on each chip. This flexibility allows the chips to be optimized for many different types of electrophysiological signals including EKG, EMG, ECoG, EEG, neural spikes, and local field potentials.
By transforming weak electrode signals directly into a digital data stream, the RHD2000 replaces all analog instrumentation and digitizing circuitry in electrophysiology monitoring and acquisition systems. Intan Technologies provides an open-source USB/FPGA interface to stream digital data from multiple RHD2000 chips to a host computer in real time.
RHD2000 series chips are available in 8 mm x 8 mm plastic QFN surface-mount packages for solder assembly on printed circuit boards, and are also available in bare die form for chip-on-board assembly.
RHD2000 chips are now available directly from Intan Technologies. A new RHD2000 evaluation system offers a quick way to evaluate the performance and operation of RHD2216 and RHD2132 chips with a plug-and-play USB interface and open-source multi-platform GUI software written in C++/Qt. Please sign up for our email newsletter to receive updates as new hardware components and software improvements are added to the evaluation system.
For a detailed description of chip functions, see the RHD2000 Series datasheet. Users of the older RHA2000 analog-output series of amplifier chips may wish to view this one-page comparison of the RHA2000 and RHD2000 devices.
RHD2000 Family
- RHD2216 16-channel amplifier chip with differential (bipolar) inputs.
- RHD2132 32-channel amplifier chip with unipolar inputs and one common reference input.
- RHD2164 64-channel amplifier chip with unipolar inputs and one common reference input. Available in 7.1mm x 4.3mm bare die only. Coming in mid 2013.
RHD2000 Series Features
- Fully integrated electrophysiology amplifier array with on-chip 16-bit ADC and industry-standard serial peripheral interface (SPI)
- ADC operation to 1.05 MSamples per second; supports sampling 32 amplifier channels at 30 kSamples/s each
- Low input-referred noise: 2.4 microvolts rms typical
- Standard four-wire 16-bit SPI interface with CMOS or low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) I/O pins
- Upper cutoff frequency of all amplifiers set by on-chip registers; adjustable from 100 Hz to 20 kHz
- Lower cutoff frequency of all amplifiers set by on-chip registers; adjustable from 0.1 Hz to 500 Hz
- Integrated multi-frequency in situ electrode impedance measurement capability
- Optional on-chip DSP high-pass filters for amplifier offset removal
- Auxiliary ADC inputs for interfacing additional off-chip sensors
- Individual amplifier power up/down for power minimization
RHD2000 Series Applications
- Miniaturized multi-channel headstages for neural or ECoG recording
- Massively parallel neural recording for advanced brain activity mapping
- Low-power wireless headstages or backpacks for electrophysiology experiments
- "Smart Petri dish" in vitro recording systems
- Simultaneous recording of spikes and local field potentials (LFPs) from microelectrodes
- Portable multi-channel EKG or EMG monitoring systems
- Advanced prosthetic limb controller front-ends