The goals of the course are to present ways of understanding the electrical functioning of the nervous system and to enable students to build instrumentation to study the nervous system. The course will be designed to stand alone but could also feed into introductory electrical engineering courses. The course will include:

• Practical laboratory exercises building circuits.
• Analytical techniques designed for the math background typical in biology.
• Circuit simulation techniques made possible by fast, cheap computers.
• Specific examples drawn from practical neurobiological problems.
• Consideration of the biological environment in which electronic device must operate.

The course is a lecture/lab format. There will be weekly homework assignments and weekly lab assignments. The lecture/homework material will combine practical electronics examples with enough theory to allow design. The labs will demonstrate various electronics principles. Later in the semester, the labs will focus on construction of instruments.

Topics

The topics shown are probably more than can be covered in one semester, so there will be some selection of topics depending on the interests of the class. The topics are not arranged in chronological order, but rather in some logical (to me) grouping.

• Basics and devices
  • Definitions of R, C, batteries
  • Kirkoff's laws
  • Current-voltage relations as complex numbers -- impedance formulation
  • time domain/frequency domain
  • operational amplifiers

• Instrumentation
  • RC filters and frequency response
  • Intracellular recording -- the cell, electrode and amp as a circuit impedance, freq response, errors, noise in a resistor
  • Stimulators and the isolator equivalent circuit
  • Op-amp use building block for: amp , diff-amp, filter, comparator real op-amp limitations -- input Z, clipping, gain, noise computation using op-amps and multipliers
  • Active filters -- amp, phase, pulse considerations butterworth, bessel, chebyshev
  • Sensors -- temp, pressure, acceleration, concentration
  • Timing devices stimulators sequencers
  • Feedback and the voltage clamp control theory -- speed, accuracy error sources
  • Patch clamp -- circuit, bandwidth, noise
  • noise sources -- thermal, interference, faraday shield, ground loops

• Neurobiological models
  • Cable equation -- passive axon
  • Active axon
  • Single channels
  • current spread and cell-cell coupling -- the heart
  • multicell models

• Digital devices
  • formal logic -- combinatorial systems
  • counting, arithmetic
  • timing -- sequential logic
  • digital filters -- DSPs

• Technologies
  • Electronics Workbench -- simulated circuits
  • Matlab -- gerneral computing language
  • prototype boards
  • Range of ICs available for your use.
  • Motors, servos and muscle wires
  • Microcontrollers