Balancing Specialized Versus Flexible Computation in Brain-Computer Interfaces
Journal
IEEE Micro
Journal Volume
41
Journal Issue
3
Date Issued
2021-05-01
Author(s)
Karageorgos, Ioannis
Sriram, Karthik
Vesely, Jan
Lindsay, Nick
Wen, Xiayuan
Powell, Marc
Borton, David
Manohar, Rajit
Bhattacharjee, Abhishek
Abstract
We are building HALO, a flexible ultralow-power processing architecture for implantable brain- computer interfaces (BCIs) that directly communicate with biological neurons in real time. This article discusses the rigid power, performance, and flexibility tradeoffs that BCI designers must balance, and how we overcome them via HALO's palette of domain-specific hardware accelerators, general-purpose microcontroller, and configurable interconnect. Our evaluations using neuronal data collected in vivo from a nonhuman primate, along with full-stack algorithm to chip codesign, show that HALO achieves flexibility and superior performance per watt versus existing implantable BCIs.
Type
journal article