Starfish Neuroscience, a neural chip company of Valve founder Gabe Newell, has announced the development of custom chips designed for the next generation, minimally invasive brain computer interfaces.
In a blog update, the company announced that it is working with R&D reader IMEC to create custom, ultra-low power neural chips.
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According to Starfish, the chip is targeted at future wireless, battery-free brain implants that can read and stimulate neural activity in multiple regions simultaneously. This is an important requirement for treating complex neurological disorders, including circuit-level dysfunction. It is a “read and write” feature that Newell heard in a previous talk on the subject.
The purpose of this project is to overcome the current limitations of minimally invasive neural interface implants, often bulky, power-hungry and difficult to scale across multiple brain regions.
Current clinical techniques like Elon Musk’s Neuralink (approved by the FDA in 2023) usually focus on single-local interventions in the motor cortex of the brain. In contrast, starfish want to reduce the burden of surgery by miniaturizing them, allowing for easy placement of implants at multiple sites.
And at just 2x4mm, the starfish chip is small. If you’ve never read the Brain Chip spec sheet from a company founded by Gabe Newell in Valve, then Welcome to the Future. Starfish’s first brain chip boasts:
- Low Power: 1.1 MW total power consumption during normal recording
- Physically small: 2 x 4mm (0.3mm pitch BGA)
- Both recording (spikes and LFP) and stimulation (biphasic pulses) are possible
- 32 electrode sites, 16 simultaneous recording channels at 18.75kHz
- One current source for stimulation with any pair of electrodes
- On-board impedance monitoring and stim voltage transient measurements
- Digital on-board data processing and spike detection allow devices to operate through low-bandwidth wireless interfaces.
- Manufactured with the TSMC 55NM process
But it’s still in the early days. The company is currently looking for early stage collaborators, especially dense people, working with wireless power delivery, communications and implantable neural devices, to explore new applications for the technology ahead of expected availability in the second half of 2025.
As Newell has long suggested, the real possibility goes beyond medicine, saying in 2023 “we’re way closer to the ‘matrix’ than people perceive.”
“I think connecting people’s motor cortex and visual cortex is much easier than I expected, and reading and writing someone’s motor cortex is a much easier problem than people feel “cold.” “And I didn’t guess that before going into it. Your brain has a really good interface for some things and the Kuldi interface for doing other things has a very good interface. And the fact that your immune system is involved in recognition of temperature is that there are all kinds of brains in the brain that are involved in the sensations of your brain.
In 2019, before leaving the valve, the company’s leading experimental psychologist, Mike Unbinder, also gave insight into how the Brain-Computer Interface informs immersive games.
“You can measure your response to stimuli within the game. And while you’re not always starting to get (data) and surely (data) and you’re starting to think about what you want to know about your players. There’s a long list of things you can get right now with current technology, current generation analysis, and current generation experiments.” Brain-Computer Interfaces: One Possible Future About How We Play.
Thank you to Brad “Sadilyitsbradley” Lynch for turning us into the news.