Hiring in life sciences? Share your open positions with our professional community. Read more Close

Advertisement

A Thin Film Transistor Backplane for Scalable Chronic Neural Interfaces

Created on 25 Jun 2026

Authors

Bourhis, A. M., Vatsyayan, R., Tonsfeldt, K. J., Galton, I., Dayeh, S. A.

Abstract

Scaling neural interfaces to ever-higher channel counts has accelerated rapidly with advances in thin-film fabrication, lithography, and connectorization, enabling passive arrays to reach thousands of channels and chart credible pathways to much larger formats. Integrating active electronics directly at the sensing sites offers a complementary route to higher channel density by reducing the number of interconnects required to access large arrays. Here we introduce a monolithic flexible thin-film integrated circuit platform for active neural sensing, inspired by active-matrix display technology. The system integrates dual-gate amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide transistors on polyimide substrates to implement in-pixel transconductance amplification and row-column time-division multiplexing, improving scability for high-channel-count applications. Co-optimization of device architecture, contact engineering, and a hybrid ceramic-polymer thin-film encapsulation yields stable operation with projected lifetimes exceeding 38 years under accelerated aging. In acute and chronic in vivo rat studies, the platform exhibits negligible thermal burden, robust sensory-evoked recordings, and stable functionality over 30 days despite tissue encapsulation. These results establish display-inspired flexible thin-film electronics as a scalable building block for next-generation neural interfaces.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 25 Jun 2026.

Advertisement

Stats

  • Community rating n/a 0 votes
  • Your rating

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this preprint? Sign in in to submit your rating.

  • Recommendations n/a n/a positive of 0 vote(s)
  • Views 7
  • Comments 0

Recommended by

  • No recommendations yet.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Advertisement