A new brain implant could significantly reshape how people interact with computers while offering new treatment possibilities for conditions such as epilepsy, spinal cord injury, ALS, stroke, and blindness. By creating a minimally invasive, high-throughput communication path to the brain, it has the potential to support seizure control and help restore motor, speech, and visual abilities.
The promise of this technology comes from its extremely small size paired with its ability to transmit data at very high speeds. Developed through a collaboration between Columbia University, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania, the device is a brain-computer interface (BCI) built around a single silicon chip. This chip forms a wireless, high-bandwidth link between the brain and external computers. The system is known as the Biological Interface System to Cortex (BISC).
A study published Dec. 8 in Nature Electronics outlines BISC’s architecture, which includes the chip-based implant, a wearable “relay station,” and the software needed to run the platform. “Most implantable systems are built around a canister of electronics that occupies enormous volumes of space inside the body,” says Ken Shepard, Lau Family Professor of Electrical Engineering, professor of biomedical engineering, and professor of neurological sciences at Columbia University, who served as one of the senior authors and led the engineering work. “Our implant is a single integrated circuit chip that is so thin that it can slide into the space between the brain and the skull, resting on the brain like a piece of wet tissue paper.”
Transforming the Cortex Into a High-Bandwidth Interface
Shepard worked closely with senior and co-corresponding author Andreas S. Tolias, PhD, professor at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University and co-founding director of the Enigma Project. Tolias’s extensive experience training AI systems on large-scale neural recordings, including those collected with BISC, helped the team analyze how well the implant could decode brain activity. “BISC turns the cortical surface into an effective portal, delivering high-bandwidth, minimally invasive read-write communication with AI and external devices,” Tolias says. “Its single-chip scalability paves the way for adaptive neuroprosthetics and brain-AI interfaces to treat many neuropsychiatric disorders, such as epilepsy.”
Dr. Brett Youngerman, assistant professor of neurological surgery at Columbia University and neurosurgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, served as the project’s main clinical collaborator. “This high-resolution, high-data-throughput device has the potential to revolutionize the management of neurological conditions from epilepsy to paralysis,” he says. Youngerman, Shepard, and NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia epilepsy neurologist Dr. Catherine Schevon recently secured a National Institutes of Health grant to use BISC in treating drug-resistant epilepsy. “The key to effective brain-computer interface devices is to maximize the information flow to and from the brain, while making the device as minimally invasive in its surgical implantation as possible. BISC surpasses previous technology on both fronts,” Youngerman adds.
“Semiconductor technology has made this possible, allowing the computing power of room-sized computers to now fit in your pocket,” Shepard says. “We are now doing the same for medical implantables, allowing complex electronics to exist in the body while taking up almost no space.”
Next-Generation BCI Engineering
BCIs function by connecting with the electrical signals used by neurons to communicate. Current medical-grade BCIs typically rely on multiple separate microelectronic components, such as amplifiers, data converters, and radio transmitters. These parts must be stored in a relatively large implanted canister, placed either by removing part of the skull or in another part of the body like the chest, with wires extending to the brain.
BISC is built differently. The entire system resides on a single complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuit that has been thinned to 50 μm and occupies less than 1/1000th the volume of a standard implant. With a total size of about 3 mm3, the flexible chip can curve to match the brain’s surface. This micro-electrocorticography (µECoG) device contains 65,536 electrodes, 1,024 recording channels, and 16,384 stimulation channels. Because the chip is produced using semiconductor industry manufacturing methods, it is suitable for large-scale production.
The chip integrates a radio transceiver, a wireless power circuit, digital control electronics, power management, data converters, and the analog components necessary for both recording and stimulation. The external relay station provides power and data communication through a custom ultrawideband radio link that reaches 100 Mbps, a throughput at least 100 times higher than any other wireless BCI currently available. Operating as an 802.11 WiFi device, the relay station effectively bridges any computer to the implant.
BISC incorporates its own instruction set along with a comprehensive software environment, forming a specialized computing system for brain interfaces. The high-bandwidth recording demonstrated in this study allows brain signals to be processed by advanced machine-learning and deep-learning algorithms, which can interpret complex intentions, perceptual experiences, and brain states.
“By integrating everything on one piece of silicon, we’ve shown how brain interfaces can become smaller, safer, and dramatically more powerful,” Shepard says.
Advanced Semiconductor Fabrication
The BISC implant was fabricated using TSMC’s 0.13-μm Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) technology. This fabrication method combines three semiconductor technologies into one chip to produce mixed-signal integrated circuits (ICs). It allows digital logic (from CMOS), high-current and high-voltage analog functions (from bipolar and DMOS transistors), and power devices (from DMOS) to work together efficiently, all of which are essential for BISC’s performance.
Moving From the Lab Toward Clinical Use
To transition the system into real-world medical use, Shepard’s group partnered with Youngerman at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. They developed surgical procedures to place the thin implant safely in a preclinical model and confirmed that the device produced high-quality, stable recordings. Short-term intraoperative studies in human patients are already underway.
“These initial studies give us invaluable data about how the device performs in a real surgical setting,” Youngerman says. “The implants can be inserted through a minimally invasive incision in the skull and slid directly onto the surface of the brain in the subdural space. The paper-thin form factor and lack of brain-penetrating electrodes or wires tethering the implant to the skull minimize tissue reactivity and signal degradation over time.”
Extensive preclinical work in the motor and visual cortices was carried out with Dr. Tolias and Bijan Pesaran, professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania, both recognized leaders in computational and systems neuroscience.
“The extreme miniaturization by BISC is very exciting as a platform for new generations of implantable technologies that also interface with the brain with other modalities such as light and sound,” Pesaran says.
BISC was developed through the Neural Engineering System Design program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and draws on Columbia’s deep expertise in microelectronics, the advanced neuroscience programs at Stanford and Penn, and the surgical capabilities of NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Commercial Development and Future AI Integration
To move the technology closer to practical use, researchers at Columbia and Stanford created Kampto Neurotech, a startup founded by Columbia electrical engineering alumnus Dr. Nanyu Zeng, one of the project’s lead engineers. The company is producing research-ready versions of the chip and working to secure funding to prepare the system for use in human patients.
“This is a fundamentally different way of building BCI devices,” Zeng says. “In this way, BISC has technological capabilities that exceed those of competing devices by many orders of magnitude.”
As artificial intelligence continues to advance, BCIs are gaining momentum both for restoring lost abilities in people with neurological disorders and for potential future applications that enhance normal function through direct brain-to-computer communication.
“By combining ultra-high resolution neural recording with fully wireless operation, and pairing that with advanced decoding and stimulation algorithms, we are moving toward a future where the brain and AI systems can interact seamlessly — not just for research, but for human benefit,” Shepard says. “This could change how we treat brain disorders, how we interface with machines, and ultimately how humans engage with AI.”
