A neural probe with up to 966 electrodes and up to 384 configurable channels in 0.13 μm SOI CMOS

In vivo recording of neural action-potential and local-field-potential signals requires the use of high-resolution penetrating probes. Several international initiatives to better understand the brain are driving technology efforts towards maximizing the number of recording sites while minimizing the neural probe dimensions. We designed and fabricated (0.13-μm SOI Al CMOS) a 384-channel configurable neural probe for large-scale in vivo recording of neural signals. Up to 966 selectable active electrodes were integrated along an implantable shank (70 μm wide, 10 mm long, 20 μm thick), achieving a crosstalk of −64.4 dB. The probe base (5 × 9 mm2) implements dual-band recording and a 1

An efficient memory organization for high-ILP inner modem baseband SDR processors

his paper presents a memory organization for SDR inner modem baseband processors that focus on exploiting ILP. This memory organization uses power- efficient, single-ported, interleaved scratch-pad memory banks to provide enough bandwidth to a high-ILP processors. A system of queues in the memory interface is used to resolve bank conflicts among the single-ported banks, and to spread long bursts of conflicting accesses to the same bank over time. Bank address rotation is used to spread long bursts of conflicting accesses over multiple banks. All proposed techniques have been implemented in hardware, and are evaluated for a number of different wireless communication standards. For the 11a|n benchmarks, the overhead of stall cycles resulting from unresolved bank conflicts can be reduced to below 2% with the proposed organization. For 3GPP-LTE, the most demanding wireless standard we evaluated, the overhead is reduced to less than 0.13%. This is achieved with little energy and area overhead, and without any bank-aware compiler support

Compact VNIR snapshot multispectral airborne system and integration with drone system

Multispectral imaging technology analyzes for each pixel a wide spectrum of light and provides more spectral information compared to traditional RGB images. Most current Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) camera systems are limited by the number of spectral bands (≤10 bands) and are usually not fully integrated with the ground controller to provide a live view of the spectral data. We have developed a compact multispectral camera system which has two CMV2K 4x4 snapshot mosaic sensors internally, providing 31 bands in total covering the visible and near-infrared spectral range (460-860nm). It is compatible with (but not limited to) the DJI M600 and can be easily mounted to the drone. Our system is fully integrated with the drone, providing stable and consistent communication between the flight controller, the drone/UAV, and our camera payload. With our camera control application on an Android tablet connected to the flight controller, users can easily control the camera system with a live view of the data and many useful information including histogram, sensor temperature, etc. The system acquires images at a maximum framerate of 2x20 fps and saves them on an internal storage of 1T Byte. The GPS data from the drone is logged with our system automatically. After the flight, data can be easily transferred to an external hard disk. Then the data can be visualized and processed using our software into single multispectral cubes and one stitched multispectral cube with a data quality report and a stitching report