"The most complicated object in the known universe is sitting on your shoulder." With advancements in semiconductor and flexible technologies, high-density intra-cortical micro-electrode arrays (MEAs) enable electrical sensing with sub-millisecond temporal resolution and tens of micrometer spatial resolution. However, one of the key challenges yet to be overcome is the lack of high-capacity, miniature, and energy-efficient wireless telemetry, which allows neural sensors to be chronically implanted without the risk of infection. Such high-fidelity neural sensors produce a huge amount of data that needs to be wirelessly transferred across layers of tissue without introducing heating, but miniature neural implants have very limited resources to support energy-consuming data transmission. Inspired by retinas, the energy consumption for processing and transportation of information can be significantly reduced if only the changes are processed with "spikes" and propagated using "ions". In this talk, we will discuss how we can learn from biology to design a spiking wireless telemetry for future implantable neural interfaces.

Yao-Hong Liu is currently Scientific Director in IMEC. He is a recipient of European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant. He is a guest assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. His current research focuses on wireless communication and edge computation for implantable brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and IoT applications. Dr. Liu received his Ph.D. degree from National Taiwan University, Taiwan, in 2009. He was with Via Telecom (now Intel), Taiwan, and Mobile Devices, Taiwan, from 2002 to 2010, developing wireless transceiver ICs. Since 2010, he joined imec, the Netherlands, and is leading the scientific research of the ultra-low power ASIC design. He received the IEEE Brain and Solid-State Circuits joint-society best paper award honorable mention 2022. He served as a technical program committee of IEEE ISSCC and is currently a steering committee member of IEEE RFIC symposium.