For decades, researchers developing implantable neuromodulation devices have faced a persistent and costly bottleneck: the leap from benchtop prototyping directly into in vivo animal studies. This gap introduces enormous variability. Device performance that looks flawless on an oscilloscope in dry-lab conditions often behaves very differently once surrounded by living tissue, ionic fluids, and the complex electromagnetic environment of a biological system.

The result? Experiments fail. Data becomes irreproducible. Precious animal lives are used to debug hardware that could have been refined earlier. Funding cycles stretch thin, and promising neurotechnologies stall before they ever reach clinical translation.

The NeuroTest Board (NTB) was conceived to solve exactly this problem. Developed by NeuroTest / MCS Ltd., the NTB is a purpose-built, open-source benchtop evaluation system that bridges the gap between dry electronics testing and live animal experiments. It creates a physiologically realistic saline bath environment — a true ionic medium that mimics the tissue-electrode interface — and then populates that environment with programmable, high-fidelity neural signals.

What sets the NTB apart is its ability to play back real neural recordings — local field potentials captured from animal studies, intracranial EEG from human subjects, and customizable synthetic waveforms — while simultaneously recording those same signals as ground truth. This means you can compare what your device under test “sees” against what was actually transmitted. You can characterize noise floors down to approximately 4 µV RMS. You can quantify stimulation artifact properties, develop mitigation strategies, and validate closed-loop algorithms with known inputs and measurable outputs.

The NTB is not merely a signal generator. It is a complete test ecosystem combining a 32-bit Arm Cortex M7 processing unit, a 24-bit precision ADC sensing circuit, and a high-precision arbitrary current source waveform generator — all galvanically isolated to minimize noise contamination. It supports configurable evoked potential simulation with programmable amplitude, frequency, latency, and waveform templates, triggered by detected stimulation pulses from the device under test.

And because the entire platform is open-source, your lab can modify firmware, extend functionality, and adapt the system to novel experimental paradigms without waiting for a vendor’s roadmap. This is the tool that leading preclinical and clinical research teams are now using to accelerate their neuromodulation pipelines — and it can do the same for yours.