Valve founder Gabe Newell’s neural chip company Starfish Neuroscience announced it’s developing a custom chip designed for next-generation, minimally invasive brain-computer interfaces—and it may be coming sooner than you think.
The company announced in a blog update that it’s creating a custom, ultra-low power neural chip in collaboration with R&D leader imec.
Starfish says the chip is intended for future wireless, battery-free brain implants capable of reading and stimulating neural activity in multiple areas simultaneously—a key requirement for treating complex neurological disorders involving circuit-level dysfunction. That’s the ‘read and write’ functions we’ve heard Newell speak about in previous talks on the subject.
The project aims to overcome current limitations of minimally-invasive neural interface implants, which are often bulky, power-hungry, and difficult to scale across multiple brain regions.
Current clinical technologies, like Elon Musk’s Neuralink (approved by the FDA in 2023), typically focus on single-region intervention in the brain’s motor cortex. In contrast, Starfish hopes to reduce surgical burden through miniaturization, making implants easier to place across multiple sites.
And at just 2 × 4mm, Starfish’s chip is tiny. If you never imaged reading a brain chip spec sheet from a company founded by Valve’s Gabe Newell, well, welcome to the future. Starfish’s first brain chip boasts:
- Low power: 1.1 mW total power consumption during normal recording
- Physically small: 2 x 4mm (0.3mm pitch BGA)
- Capable of both recording (spikes and LFP) & stimulation (biphasic pulses)
- 32 electrode sites, 16 simultaneous recording channels at 18.75kHz
- 1 current source for stimulating on arbitrary pairs of electrodes
- Onboard impedance monitoring and stim voltage transient measurement
- Digital onboard data processing and spike detection allows the device to operate via low-bandwidth wireless interfaces.
- Fabricated in TSMC 55nm process
It’s still early days though. The company is now calling for early-stage collaborators—particularly those working in wireless power delivery, communication, and implantable neural devices—to explore novel applications of this technology ahead of its expected availability in late 2025.
As Newell has long suggested, the real potential lies beyond medicine, noting back in 2023 that “we’re way closer to ‘the Matrix’ than people realize.”
“I think connecting to people’s motor cortex and visual cortex is going to be way easier than people expected and doing things like […] reading and writing to somebody’s motor cortex is way more of a tractable problem than making people feel ‘cold’. And you never would have guessed that,” Newell said in a 2023 interview with IGN. “And I never would have guessed that before going into it. It turns out your brain has really good interfaces for some things and really badly designed, kludgy interfaces for doing other things. And the fact that your immune system gets involved in your perception of temperature means there’s all sorts of weird parts of your brain that participate in the sensation of being cold, whereas your motor cortex [or] your visual cortex are much more tractable problems.”
In 2019, prior to his departure from Valve, the company’s Principal Experimental Psychologist Mike Ambinder also gave some insight into how brain-computer interface might inform immersive games.
“We can measure responses to in-game stimuli. And we’re not always getting [data] reliably, but we’re starting to figure out how. Think about what you’d want to know about your players. There’s a long list of things we can get right now with current technology, current generation analysis, and current generation experimentation,” Armbinder said in his GDC 2019 talk, which was entitled Brain-Computer Interfaces: One Possible Future for How We Play.
Thanks to Brad ‘SadlyItsBradley’ Lynch for pointing us to the news.
