Valve’s founder, Gabe Newell, has reportedly been investing in a brain chip company that’s currently lining up its first big product launch.
With several new Half-Life 3 rumors circulating of late, fans may be wondering what developer, businessman, and Valve founder Gabe Newell has been up to lately.
Well, one thing for sure is that he’s been involved in a startup called Starfish Neuroscience, which is developing a brain-computer interface.
Think of it like chips that enable “simultaneous access to multiple brain regions” and record brain activity. Instead of expecting to play games with your brain, though, these seem to have a medical focus as their purpose, such as disease therapy for Parkinson’s, for example.
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Valve founder’s brain-computer startup is interested in collaborators
Steam, PixabayGabe Newell is now also the co-founder of Starfish.
According to Starfish’s official blog post, the company is developing “new technologies that allow for recording and stimulation of neural activity with a level of precision vastly exceeding what is possible with currently available systems.”
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Describing the product as an “ultra-low power, miniature electrophysiological electronics” custom chip, they explained that their goal for this chip is to “center on minimal size and low power while maintaining functionality similar to existing general-purpose head stage designs capable of both recording.”
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The chip itself is confirmed to have these features:
- 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
Though there’s no exact date yet, the company mentioned that it is anticipating the chips to arrive in late 2025 and that they’re also open to “finding collaborators.”
“At this early stage, we’re especially interested in collaborators for whom this technology would pair well with their existing work in fields such as wireless power delivery and communication or those designing custom implanted neural interfaces,” they added.
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