Neural implant programmed and charged remotely

The advance by Rice University engineers in Texas is an integrated microsystem dubbed MagNI (magnetoelectric neural implant) that incorporates magnetoelectric transducers. These allow the chip to harvest power from an alternating magnetic field outside the body.

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The system was developed by Kaiyuan Yang, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; Jacob Robinson, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and bioengineering; and co-lead authors Zhanghao Yu, a graduate student, and graduate student Joshua Chen, all at Rice's Brown School of Engineering.

Yang introduced the project this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

According to Rice, MagNI targets applications that require programmable, electrical stimulation of neurons, for instance to help patients with epilepsy or Parkinson's disease.

"This is the first demonstration that you can use a magnetic field to power an implant and also to program the implant," Yang said in a statement. "By integrating magnetoelectric transducers with CMOS [complementary metal-oxide semiconductor] technologies, we provide a bioelectronic platform for many applications. CMOS is powerful, efficient and cheap for sensing and signal processing tasks."