General-Purpose Architecture for implantable Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI)

BCIs record neuronal activity with high fidelity. BCI development is ever moving beyond academic labs to industry, with companies like Kernel, Mindmaze, Longeviti, Neuropace, Neurable, Medtronic, and Neuralink building new generations of fully implantable embedded BCIs.

Implanted devices have 1) device power budgets 2) RF power transmission constraints needed to mitigate the power deposited in brain tissue per strict FDA, FCC, and IEEE guidelines. This has led to a fragmented ecosystem of BCI chip designs. Yet the logic on board these devices is tailored for specific uses (e.g., seizure detection versus data recording, etc.) and for specific brain regions.

HALO realizes a general-purpose architecture:

• Novel interconnect and switch processing elements developed in Manohar lab.
• HALO achieves 4-57× reductions in power consumption versus known software alternatives.
• All processing pipelines operate under 15mW budgets with greatly reduced radio RF bandwidth.
• Evaluation suits full range of neurological disease domains: from neuronal signal extraction to seizure onset detection (epilepsy) and movement intention (paralysis and Parkinson’s disease).
• The HALO team is currently (2020) taping out the first generation of HALO chips.