  A bio-inspired Neuron-ADC with reconfigurable sampling and static power
reduction for biomedical applications is proposed in this work. The Neuron-ADC
leverages level-crossing sampling and a bio-inspired refractory circuit to
compressively converts bio-signal to digital spikes and
information-of-interest. The proposed design can not only avoid dissipating ADC
energy on unnecessary data but also achieve reconfigurable sampling, making it
appropriate for either low power operation or high accuracy conversion when
dealing with various kinds of bio-signals. Moreover, the proposed dynamic
comparator can reduce static power up to 41.1% when tested with a 10 kHz
sinusoidal input. Simulation results of 40 nm CMOS process show that the
Neuron-ADC achieves a maximum ENOB of 6.9 bits with a corresponding FoM of 97
fJ/conversion under 0.6 V supply voltage.
