English

An Efficient Wireless iBCI Headstage with Adaptive ADC Sample Rate

Networking and Internet Architecture 2026-04-27 v2 Performance

Abstract

Implantable Brain-Computer Interfaces (iBCIs) are increasingly pivotal in clinical and daily applications. However, wireless iBCIs face severe constraints in power consumption and data throughput. To mitigate these bottlenecks, we propose a wireless iBCI headstage featuring adaptive ADC sampling and spike detection. Distinguishing our design from traditional application-layer compression, we employ a server-driven architecture that achieves source-level efficiency. Specifically, the server learns an optimal, electrode-specific sample rate vector to dynamically reconfigure the ADC hardware. This strategy reduces data volume directly at the acquisition layer (ADC and amplifier) rather than relying on computationally intensive post-digitization processing. Extensive experiments across diverse subjects and arrays demonstrate a power reduction of up to 40 mW and a 3.2x decrease in FPGA resource utilization, all while maintaining or exceeding decoding accuracy in both motor and visual tasks. This design offers a highly practical solution for long-term in-vivo recording.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.21247,
  title  = {An Efficient Wireless iBCI Headstage with Adaptive ADC Sample Rate},
  author = {Hongyao Liu and Junyi Wang and Jinglong Chen and Liuqun Zhai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.21247},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

EMBC'26, 7 pages, version 2

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:31:49.517Z