MEAs, such as polytrodes and neural probes, and in vitro MEAs that generally include a cell culture dish or some other sort of medium chamber. Further, we classify the different array architectures, as will be explained in Section Advances in MEA and Probe Devices (Figure 3). Briefly, we distinguish between “fixed wiring” arrays, meaning that each transducer in the array has a direct wire to the outside of the array and “multiplexed arrays,” in which some sort of switching mechanism is employed within the array. We use the term “array” to refer to the actual area that encompasses the transducer elements only and we use device or MEA to refer to the entire device. With system, we refer to the MEA and all required components to operate it, such as the data acquisition hardware and software. We use the terms “active” and “passive” to distinguish between devices with active circuit elements, such as transistors, and devices without such elements.
