A CMOS Squarer Based Nonlinear Filter for Spike Detection

In this paper it is presented a squarer based nonlinear operator for spike detection and its CMOS hardware implementation. The performance of the proposed operator is compared against the classical Nonlinear Energy Operator showing good agreement between both for signals with low Signal-to-Noise-Ratio. The proposed circuit implementation take advantage of its discrete time nature to reduce the power dissipation by turning off the most power hungry circuit when it is not necessary. It was designed aiming a standard CMOS 90nm process and simulations shown a power dissipation of 20nW for 1V supply voltage at 24KSps of sampling frequency; and occupies 0.014mm 2 .