shunt capacitance to the signal is small (Robinson, 1968; Nelson et al., 2008). HDMEAs require small electrodes to achieve a high resolution, and therefore also the Ce is usually small. However, monolithic integration allows keeping Cs small too. For example, Cs is estimated to be below 0.5 pF for the HDMEA presented in Frey et al. (2010), whereas passive MEA can have a significantly larger parasitic capacitance, depending on the thickness of the insulation and the track width [e.g., James et al. measured values of 60–100 pF (James et al., 2004) and Nisch et al. estimated it to be below 15 pF (Nisch et al., 1994)]. For measurements requiring a high accuracy despite having a device with a large Cs, capacitance compensation circuits can be used, as those commonly used in patch-clamp amplifiers and, e.g., also used for highly accurate tissue impedance measurements (Logothetis et al., 2007).
