IONOS: An Iono-Electronic Interface for Communication with Living Systems

虽然我们对大脑的理解已经取得了巨大的进步，但我们在将生物系统与电子设备连接起来方面仍然效率低下，无论是在能量还是整合潜力方面。由于需要使用传统计算机来构建专用于大脑接口应用的复杂系统，我们主要利用从微电子继承的技术和架构，这些技术和架构本质上不适合与生命系统接口。IONOS研究计划将通过开发旨在与生物细胞密切互动的新技术并充分利用生物灵感来改变大脑接口范式。为了实现这一目标，IONOS将探索如何感知，刺激和计算基于离子电子材料和器件的体外神经细胞组装的生物信号。这些新兴的设备提供了基本的功能，如记忆，离子电子信号的转导和放大，为设备和电路工程的新领域铺平了道路，可以有效地再现关键的生物功能，如学习和信息的时空处理。该计划将展示这些与生物启发计算范式相关的概念如何解锁我们与活神经细胞通信的基本限制。概念证明将展示人工系统如何有效地发送，接收和计算生物信息，这构成了通信的基础。

While our understanding of the brain has made huge progresses, we are still inefficient in interfacing biological systems with electronics, both in terms of energy and integration potential. Pushed by the need to use conventional computers for building complex systems dedicated to brain interface applications, we have mostly capitalized on technologies and architectures inherited from microelectronic that are intrinsically not adapted to interface living systems. The IONOS research program will shift the brain interface paradigm by developing new technologies designed to interact intimately with biological cells and capitalizing heavily on bio-inspiration. To reach this goal, IONOS will explore how to sense, stimulate and compute biological signals from in-vitro neural cells' assembly based on iono-electronic materials and devices. These emerging devices offer basics functionalities such as memory, ion-electron signal's transduction, and amplification paving the way to a new field of device and circuit engineering that could efficiently reproduce key biological functions such as learning and spatio-temporal processing of information. This program will demonstrate how these concepts associated to the bio-inspired computing paradigm can unlock our fundamental limitations for communicating with living neural cells. Proof of concept will show how an artificial system can efficiently send, receive and compute information from a biological one, which constitutes the basic of communication.