The Neuropixels Platform Talk
October 3, 2022
Post Event Brief
Recent advances in CMOS integrated MEMS, have enabled and increased routine extracellular electrophysiology recording capability and capacity from dozens to thousands of neurons. Applying “a scaling platform approach” will enable the next generation of systems to visualize 10’s to 100’s of thousands of neurons.
On the Monday afternoon of 3 Oct 2022, We were pleased to have Mr. Barundeb Dutta, Chief Scientist of IMEC, Belgium, in the campus of College of Design and Engineering to share in person on how this vision could become reality!
In this Engineering-in-Medicine talk, Mr. Dutta shared his development work on on a very high channel count electrophysiology device: Neuropixels, and the prospects for another 10-50X capacity increase, and addressed progress towards “recording form the whole brain”. For the Neuropixels technology, he illustrated a few transformational neuroscience experiments that the technology enables, and its power to co-integrate different modalities, such as enabling precise and continuous monitoring of the neuron activities in the whole brain.
In addition, he talked about some of the challenges in the Neuropixels data volume has created and the potential for single-neuron-based neuro-electronic medicine. He also discussed about the power of a global ecosystem for a technology platform to impact and accelerate an interdisciplinary science, of semiconductor engineers, neurotechnologists, neuroscientists, and neurosurgeons. To quote Mr Dutta, “ask the right questions, solve the right problem, the multi-discipline solution can change the world”.
At the end of the session, attendees got to explore with Mr. Dutta the limits of this research frontier: How much is enough neurons? It was a lively discussion session with numerous questions raised from attendees.
The session wrapped up at 2:30 pm, with Professor Aaron Thean, Director of SHINE centre, presenting Mr Dutta with a gift as a token of appreciation.
About the Speaker
Mr. Barun Dutta has been the Chief Scientist of IMEC, since 2010, leading multiple R&D programs in Silicon Technology Systems, with an emphasis on novel materials and device technologies. He most recently initiated and has led device programs in GaN LED’s, Power/RF Devices, ultra-high performance imaging, integrated photonics, wafer scale technologies for life sciences applications in neurotech and genomics. His current interests in device scaling lie in the realization of new devices from 2D materials and their patterning.\
From 1998-2010 as a Venture Capitalist and General Partner at Sevin Rosen Funds-Alta Berkeley (A Sevin Rosen Semiconductor Systems Incubation Fund) and Entrepreneur, he worked as a Board Member and/or CXO, incubating and mentoring 15 founding teams/companies, which included, Iobox(acquired by Telefonica), Synad(acquired by ST-Micro), Native Networks(acquired by Alcatel), Siliquent (acquired by Broadcom), BeInSync(acquired by Phoenix Tech), Teradici(acquired by HP), Castify(acquired by Harmonic), Xtellus(merged w/Oclaro), PA Semi(acquired by Apple), Touch Clarity(acquired by Omniture/Adobe), Amantsys(acquired by Fidelity), Javelin Semiconductor (acquired by Avago) and Dune Networks (acquired by Broadcom).
He spent the first decade of his career, from 1988-1998, as a Member of Technical Staff and Program manager at Bellcore/Bell Labs doing research in various areas of semiconductor materials and process technology and was also an assignee at IMEC from Bell Labs/TI.
He was educated and received his undergraduate and graduate degrees, from Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA respectively.