Imec pursues Intranet of Neurons

Author: EIS Release Date: Jan 11, 2021


Imec’s Yao-Hong Liu has been awarded a €2 million European Research Council (ERC) grant for his project Intranet of Neurons (IoN).

IoN aims to revolutionize the way neuroscientists collect and process neural data by enabling the efficient transfer at high data rate from high-density sub-dural implanted recording probes while maintaining a small footprint required for minimally invasive surgery.
The new wireless telemetry network that is proposed has the capacity to support 10’s of distributed recording nodes (enabling a greater than 10,000 channels) simultaneously.
IoN will significantly scale up brain-wide recordings and propel research into brain-computer interfaces forward. The project will last for five years.


Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are designed to restore sensory-motor or cognitive functions due to trauma or neural disorders.
The currently available BCIs, however, can only record less than 1,000 neurons, and are limited to controlling simple motions such as grasping.
For BCIs to be widely applicable, and to ultimately restore movement and help paralyzed patients, we need a solution that can record greater than 10,000 neurons simultaneously, cover a large area of the brain, and include a wireless interface for transferring the massive amount of neural data efficiently.
The wireless interfaces that are currently available, are large modules that need to be placed above the skull with the risk of accidents and surgical complications.
In addition, no wireless telemetry system has been able to fulfill the data rates (500 Mbps) required to transfer data from 1,000’s of recording channels.
Therefore, a miniature wireless interface that can be implanted and that achieves a high data rate is of critical importance for a brain wide BCI.
“The ERC Consolidator Grant gives me the opportunity to perform groundbreaking research for BCIs,” says Yao-Hong Liu, “it will make the acquisition of data from large-scale neural recordings possible, from 100 times more neurons than with existing technologies, distributed across multiple areas of the human brain. This technology will also drastically improve the information throughput of existing BCIs by at least 100 times, enabling patients with disability to reconnect to the world.” 
Imec’s research on the Intranet of Neurons will take on, explore and innovate across two broad challenges:
1) Innovate and implement and realize a novel wireless link that can communicate and interconnect to a transcranial implant from above the skull. The approach will ensure an optimized and best-in-class solution for signal propagation across bone/neural tissue interfaces.
2) Research and implement a new communication protocol to maximize the network capacity. This will enable a wireless telemetry network that can accommodate 10s of distributed sensor nodes with greater than 10,000 recording channels and with power consumption at levels that avoid any tissue heating to remain well within the safety margins for thermal damage.