Over recent years, the level of miniaturization in the electronics industry has increased considerably, with circuits now being printed in the millions on just a few square centimeters. With these advancements, researchers have also made headway in the field of implantable electronic devices, such as cochlear and retinal implants. While these devices rely on inductive coupling for their energy, a new one, created by experts at the University of Washington, works without a battery, drawing its power from a radio source up to a meter away, Technology Review reports.

Delivering energy to implanted devices has been one of the most important strides of biotechnology companies for a long time. The new implantable neural sensing chip that was created at UW is now able to function on much less power than any of its predecessors, as well as to draw power from a source that is located more than a meter away. While this may not seem like much, consider that inductive coupling devices only function when their power source is within centimeters from their location.

The two main components of the new device are a microprocessor and a radio-frequency reader that acts as both a receiver and a reader, collecting information on the neural activity in its surroundings. This is the same type of technology that is currently being used to identify, decode and read information stored on radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. These tags can nowadays be found in anything from food to clothes, animals, and paranoid humans. In the experiments that demonstrated the prototype, the investigators placed the new NeuralWISP instrument inside the nervous system of moths, in an attempt to analyze their patterns of locomotion.

UW Professor of Electrical Engineering Brian Otis, the lead researcher on the new NeuralWISP, says that the new micro-controller is a lot smaller than existing devices of the same function. Other devices feature such things as an internal clock for timing operations, antennas for communications, and so on. The transistors on the new instruments are far more advanced and efficient, hence the smaller size, Otis explains. “You can have millions of transistors on a chip that's less than a cubic millimeter in volume, but the problem is with the extra parts. Our goal is to shrink everything onto a single chip and reduce the power consumption of these components so that the chip can be wirelessly powered,” he adds.