Ultra-low power, miniature electrophysiological electronics

Summary

At Starfish, we value collaboration and sharing. We’re constantly evaluating how we can best contribute to the world, be it through our own efforts or by enabling others to innovate in meaningful ways. While we develop technologies initially for our internal goals, we expect these technologies may also open doors in areas and ways we haven’t imagined. We are therefore excited to share info about our upcoming chip for miniaturized ultra-low power electrophysiology, and want to hear from you if and how this could be useful to you. Ultra-low power, miniature electrophysiological electronics: our upcoming custom chip Distributed neural interfaces hold great promise for future therapies. Existing approaches to interfacing with the brain predominantly focus on interacting with a single brain region (for example, deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease). However, there is increasing evidence that a number of neurological disorders involve circuit-level dysfunction, in which the interactions between brain regions may be misregulated. Developing better therapies for these disorders will require distributed neural interfaces capable of interacting with the brain at the circuit level; that is, reading and writing to multiple connected parts of the brain at once. Such interfaces do not yet exist clinically, and existing interfaces are not straightforward to parallelize because of their bulky physical footprints, power and communication bandwidth needs, and surgical burden. We believe there is an opportunity to develop a new class of minimally-invasive, distributed neural interfaces that enable simultaneous access to multiple brain regions. We’re working to build new technologies that allow for recording and stimulation of neural activity with a level of precision vastly exceeding what is possible with currently available systems. A key aspect of this is reducing the surgical burden of device implantation – in part by reducing implant size. We’re doing this in two primary...