Looking ahead

The day demonstrated that effective deployment of AI requires close partnerships combined with technological know-how. In his closing remarks, Andrew Smyth discussed how the day’s discussions successfully bridged the gap between theoretical research and the practical needs of infrastructure owners, operators, and planners. By bringing together global industry leaders like NEC Labs and Google with local stakeholders like West Palm Beach to New Brunswick, the event reinforced CS3’s role as a vital hub for public-private innovation.

As the center moves into its fourth year, CS3 remains focused on ensuring that technological leaps in AI translate into tangible public value. As Smyth noted in his final remarks, the center's ultimate success lies in its ability to listen to community needs before engineering begins, ensuring that the "purposeful, vibrant streetscapes" of the future are built on a foundation of trust, safety, and public good. By maintaining this commitment to a core statement of values, CS3 aims to move beyond simple data collection to create urban environments that serve the people who live in them. 

Lead Photo Caption: CS3 Managing Director Olivia Moore (far left) moderates a discussion on transforming raw traffic data into actionable insights.
Photo Credit: Timothy Lee

Dr. Masaki Suwa, the head of corporate research and development at Omron, and the president and CEO of OMRON SINIC X Corporation, said, “Our Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) solutions play a central role in ensuring the quality of printed circuit boards. Because Columbia’s MPS technology is robust to spurious reflections when inspecting mirror-like surfaces such as solder joints, dies, and chip surfaces, it has proved essential to reliable 3D inspection. As electronic components continue to miniaturize, a technology like MPS that can capture 3D shapes with high precision will become increasingly important to printed circuit board manufacturing.” 

It is rare for a technology developed in a university laboratory to achieve large-scale adoption in a fast-moving and highly demanding field such as factory automation. 

“The successful commercialization of Micro Phase Shifting underscores both the strength of Columbia’s creative fundamental research and the value of close collaboration between academia and industry to bring breakthrough innovations into real-world manufacturing environments,” said Ofra Weinberger, director of Columbia Technology Ventures at Columbia University.

”When we began this research project, we were motivated by a fundamental question: How do you recover accurate 3D information when light behaves in complex and non-ideal ways?” said Gupta. “We showed that by coding light smartly, one could separate the true 3D signal from the noise due to interreflections — a long-standing open problem in 3D imaging. Seeing that idea evolve into a method deployed at scale to help ensure the reliability of critical technologies has been a career highlight.” 

By creating an approach adopted by industry, the researchers demonstrated the value of academic research in bringing fresh ideas and rigorous thinking to business.

“Academic researchers explore a wide spectrum of problems, ranging from theoretical questions that seek to advance the knowledge base of the field to novel solutions to known practical problems,” Nayar said. “It is exciting to see one of our innovations solving a critical problem in the manufacturing of products we use on a daily basis.”

For more information about MPS technology, please visit the project page.

Lead Photo Caption: An artist’s rendering of micro phase shifting. 

Lead Photo Credit: Anna Collevecchio/Columbia Engineering

Described in a study published Dec. 8 in Nature Electronics, BISC includes a single-chip implant, a wearable “relay station,” and the custom software required to operate the system. “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 is one of the senior authors on the work and guided the engineering efforts. “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.” 

Shepard was joined in the BISC effort by 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 pioneering work training AI models on large-scale neural datasets — including datasets recorded in the Tolias laboratory using BISC — enabled the team to evaluate the device’s neural decoding performance. “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 a neurosurgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, served as the chief clinical collaborator on the project. “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 were recently awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health to implement BISC in the management of 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,” continues Youngerman.

“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.”

Smaller, Safer, and Faster

BCIs work by interfacing with the electrical signals that neurons use to transfer information throughout the brain. Today’s state-of-the-art BCIs, used in medical contexts, are constructed from individual microelectronic components, including amplifiers, data converters, radio transmitters, and power management circuits. To accommodate all these devices, a large canister of electronics must be surgically implanted in the body, either by removing a portion of the skull or by placing the device in another location, such as the chest, and running wires to the brain.

BISC works differently. The entire implant, which occupies less than 1/1000th the size of a conventional device, is a single complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuit chip thinned to just 50 μm. With a total volume of approximately 3 mm³, the flexible chip conforms to the surface of the brain. This micro-electrocorticography (µECoG) device integrates 65,536 electrodes, 1,024 simultaneous recording channels, and 16,384 stimulation channels. By leveraging the large-scale manufacturing techniques developed in the semiconductor industry, these implants can be easily manufactured at scale.

The single-chip implant includes a radio transceiver, wireless powering circuit, digital control, power management, data conversion, and the analog circuits required to support the recording and stimulation interfaces. The battery-powered relay station powers and communicates with the implant, transferring data via a custom ultrawideband radio link that achieves 100 Mbps data bandwidths — a connection with at least 100 times higher throughput than any competing wireless BCI device. The relay station is itself an 802.11 WiFi device, in effect forming a relayed wireless network connection from any computer to the brain. 

BISC has its own instruction set, supported by an extensive software stack, which together constitute a computing architecture designed for BCIs. As demonstrated in this study, these high-bandwidth recording capabilities allow brain-signal patterns to be submitted to advanced machine-learning or deep-learning frameworks for decoding complex intentions, perceptions, or 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.

The BISC implant was manufactured using TSMC’s versatile 0.13-μm Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) technology. This manufacturing process integrates three technologies onto a single chip to create mixed-signal integrated circuits (ICs). This integration enables the efficient combination of digital logic (from CMOS), high-current and high-voltage analog functions (from bipolar and DMOS transistors), and power devices (from DMOS), all of which are essential for BISC.

From Lab to Clinic

To make this technology available to doctors and patients, Shepard’s group partnered closely with Youngerman at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Together, they refined surgical methods to safely implant the paper-thin device in a preclinical model and demonstrated its recording quality and stability, as described in the current study. Studies in human patients for short-term intraoperative recordings are 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 pre-clinical testing of BISC in the motor and visual cortices drew on collaborations with both Dr. Tolias and Bijan Pesaran, professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania, both of whom are 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.

Developed under the Neural Engineering System Design program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), BISC combines Columbia’s strengths in microelectronics, Stanford’s and Penn’s cutting-edge neuroscience, and NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s surgical innovation.

Toward Real-World Applications

To accelerate translation, the Columbia and Stanford teams launched Kampto Neurotech, a spin-off company founded by Columbia electrical engineering alumnus Dr. Nanyu Zeng, one of the project’s lead engineers. Kampto Neurotech is developing commercial versions of the chip for preclinical research applications and raising funds to advance the system toward human use.

“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.” 

In a technological landscape driven by advances in artificial intelligence, BCI technologies have drawn considerable recent interest in both restoring function to those affected by neurological conditions and in potentially augmenting human capabilities by providing direct interfaces to the brain.

“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,” says Shepard. “This could change how we treat brain disorders, how we interface with machines, and ultimately how humans engage with AI.”

Lead Photo Caption: The BISC implant shown here is roughly as thick as a human hair. 

Lead Photo Credit: Columbia Engineering

About The Study

Journal: Nature Electronics

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-025-01509-9

Title: Stable, chronic in-vivo recordings from a fully wireless subdural-contained 65,536-electrode brain-computer interface device

Authors: Taesung Jung, Nanyu Zeng, Jason D. Fabbri, Guy Eichler, Zhe Li, Erfan Zabeh, Anup Das, Konstantin Willeke, Katie E. Wingel, Agrita Dubey, Rizwan Huq, Mohit Sharma, Yaoxing Hu, Girish Ramakrishnan, Kevin Tien, Paolo Mantovani, Abhinav Parihar, Heyu Yin, Denise Oswalt, Alexander Misdorp, Ilke Uguz, Tori Shinn, Gabrielle J. Rodriguez, Cate Nealley, Sophia Sanborn, Ian Gonzales, Michael Roukes, Jeffrey Knecht, Daniel Yoshor, Peter Canoll, Eleonora Spinazzi, Luca P. Carloni, Bijan Pesaran, Saumil Patel, Joshua Jacobs, Brett Youngerman, R. James Cotton, Andreas Tolias, Kenneth L. Shepard

Funding/Acknowledgments: This work was partly supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract N66001-17-C-4001, the Department of the Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program under Contract HT9425-23-1-0758, the National Science Foundation under Grant 1546296, and the National Institutes of Health under Grant R01DC01949