An Artifact-Free 290${\mu}$m²/ch 610nW/ch Neural Readout Frontend With Hybrid EDO Compensation for High-Channel-Count...

Next-generation neurorehabilitation implants demand high-channel-count closed-loop systems with ultra-low-area and ultra-low-power readout and classification. This is essential in applications such as multi-type epileptic seizure detection, brain machine interfaces or brain-to-text conversion. Although recent designs achieve compactness and low power, they often cannot record neural signals during stimulation due to large, saturating artifacts. Conversely, artifact-tolerant solutions typically incur excessive area and power overhead to avoid saturation. We introduce a paradigm shift: enabling an ultra-compact, artifact-tolerant readout frontend by permitting brief saturation during stimulation pulses and applying backend interpolation to reconstruct the signals. High-fidelity neural features can thus be extracted with minimal error. To minimize the readout area footprint and to facilitate the routing from many electrodes, we reuse the whole frontend to read-out 64 inputs in a time-multiplexed fashion. Implemented in a 40nm CMOS process, our chip leverages the first published second-order fully time-based incremental analog-to-digital converter, achieving a state-of-the-art 290-$\mu$m²/ch area occupation and only 610-nW/ch of power consumption. The proposed hybrid electrode offset compensation further minimizes the area overhead without significantly compromising the noise or common-mode/power rejection across the full cancellation range. Artifact tolerance is validated in saline using an external stimulator chip. We demonstrate that the error on a broad set of features extracted from interpolated local-field-potential data remains below $\boldsymbol{\pm}$10%, even under harsh stimulation conditions.