CMOS microelectrode array for large-scale intracellular neuroscience
For decades, neuroscience has wrestled with a tough trade-off: probe a handful of neurons with exquisite intracellular detail or monitor a large population with extracellular approximations. Detail or scale – never both. Our new intracellular microelectrode array (iMEA), powered by a silicon (CMOS) chip, breaks this divide. By massively parallelizing intracellular access, the iMEA delivers detail and scale together – opening the door to large-scale intracellular neuroscience (https://rdcu.be/eAU7n). Already, the iMEA has mapped over 70,000 plausible synaptic connections from over 2,000 cultured rat neurons, and we are now engineering it toward fully plug-and-play platforms for both in vitro and in vivo use. In this talk, I will share how this silicon-chip based technology bridges the long-standing gap between scale and detail, and how it enables precision studies of population neural dynamics and functional synaptic cartography, as well as bold new directions in neuromorphic electronics (“brain-copy-and-paste”), wetware computing, and drug discovery.
Bio: Donhee Ham is John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He was also a Samsung Fellow from 2019 to 2024 and served as Deputy Head of Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Samsung Electronics in 2024. His current research is on CMOS-bio interface, machine intelligence, integrated circuits, and beyond-CMOS electronics.