An Application Specific Instruction Set Processor (ASIP) for adaptive filters in neural prosthetics

Neural coding is an essential process for neuroprosthetic design, in which adaptive filters have been widely utilized. In a practical application, it is needed to switch between different filters, which could be based on continuous observations or point process, when the neuron models, conditions, or system requirements have changed. As candidates of coding chip for neural prostheses, low-power general purpose processors are not computationally efficient especially for large scale neural population coding. Application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) do not have flexibility to switch between different adaptive filters while the cost for design and fabrication is formidable. In this research work, we explore an application specific instruction set processor (ASIP) for adaptive filters in neural decoding activity. The proposed architecture focuses on efficient computation for the most time-consuming matrix/vector operations among commonly used adaptive filters, being able to provide both flexibility and throughput. Evaluation and implementation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed ASIP design is area-efficient while being competitive to commercial CPUs in computational performance.