Neuropixels probe

Neuropixels is a family of CMOS-integrated silicon probes (developed at IMEC with academic partners) that packs recording electrodes and their read-out electronics onto a single thin shank plus a base ASIC. A 1.0 probe carries roughly 960 titanium-nitride electrode sites at 20 µm pitch along a shank about 10 mm long and only 70 by 24 µm in cross section; an on-shank switch matrix selects which sites route to the 384 simultaneously recordable channels.

The base integrates the amplifiers, filters, time-division multiplexers and analog-to-digital converters, so the probe emits a digital stream over a thin flex cable rather than hundreds of analog wires. This is the key architectural break from the Utah array: dense sampling along depth (many sites, few simultaneous channels) instead of one site per penetrating shank, and digitisation at the source instead of downstream.

Neuropixels 2.0 pushes further to four shanks and over 5000 sites while keeping 384 channels, and is smaller for chronic use. In practice the technology is dominant in rodent and increasingly non-human-primate neurophysiology; human intracortical use is emerging but not yet routine, though it defines the high-density, digitise-at-the-source trend for future implants.