Analysis of a Low-Power OTA-Based Neural Amplifier Design for EEG Signal Acquisition

Abstract

This paper presents the design of an efficient operational transconductance amplifier (OTA) to be explicitly used for electroencephalogram (EEG) signal acquisition in neural amplifiers (NAs). The central objective of this study revolves around addressing the fundamental compromise between noise and power in the design of NAs. The overarching goal is to effectively mitigate this trade-off by introducing novel approaches. The proposed design’s novelty lies in utilizing an adaptive biasing technique instead of the traditional current mirror biasing technique. Furthermore, the conventional input differential pair of the OTA is modified to employ a self cascode flipped voltage follower (SCFVF), which eventually reduces power consumption of the NA to 0.822 [Formula: see text]W. Additionally, notable improvements in noise performance are achieved and found to be 624.9 nV/[Formula: see text] at 1 Hz. The gain and bandwidth range of the input low-noise amplifier is 54.2 dB and 2.8 Hz–207 Hz, respectively, which effectively amplifies low-amplitude noisy incoming signals, addressing the specific requirements of EEG signal acquisition.