Valve’s Starfish Prepares to Drop Brain Chip—Because What’s a Gamer Without Neural Overclocking?

Valve’s secretive R&D arm, Starfish, is gearing up to launch a brain-computer interface chip this year—just in time for gamers to max out their credit cards on hardware that’ll be obsolete in 18 months.

The tech giant’s latest play? Bypassing keyboards and controllers entirely. Early leaks suggest the chip could enable direct neural input for gaming—or turn users into unwitting beta testers for the next-gen ad-targeting algorithm. (Wall Street’s already salivating over the monetization potential.)

No pricing yet, but expect it to cost roughly three ‘mid-tier GPUs’—a currency Valve understands better than fiat. Pre-orders likely to sell out before the first independent safety review drops.

Starfish is making a miniaturized brain chip

Most existing brain chips are fairly bulky. Each side usually measures more than 5 mm (about the width of two stacked pennies) and may reach 10 mm or more per side. In addition, such chips consume a high power of 10s of milliwatts (mW).

Starfish stated that the upcoming brain chip will be miniaturized, making it much smaller than expected. The chip will have physically small dimensions of 2 x 4 millimeter (mm) and a 0.3 mm-pitch Ball Grid Array (BGA) package. A BGA is simply a type of chip carrier used for integrated circuits (ICs).

In terms of power consumption, the chip will operate at an ultra-low power range. During normal recording of brain spikes, the chip will consume a total of 1.1 milliwatts (mW). This is equivalent to powering a single LED or a low-power temperature sensor.

By having a tiny chip that consumes ultra-low power, Starfish aims to reduce the surgical impact of brain implants.

Other features include recording neural spikes and local field potentials (LFPs), which are the slower, smoother voltage fluctuations in the brain. Moreover, the chip will stimulate the brain by sending tiny electric pulses that go positive and then negative, known as biphasic pulses.

The chip will also include 32 electrode sites that interface directly with brain tissue. It will record from 16 of these sites simultaneously. Each active channel samples at 18.75 kHz to capture rapid neural spikes and waveforms with high precision.

There will be one current source for stimulating any pair of electrodes. Also, the brain chip will monitor impedance and measure voltage transients onboard. It will process data digitally, detect spikes in real-time, and transmit relevant data over low-bandwidth wireless links. The chip will be fabricated using TSMC’s 55 nm process for optimal size and efficiency.

Starfish announced that it is “interested in finding collaborators for whom such a chip WOULD open new and exciting avenues.” The company is looking for people who work in fields like wireless communications or people who design custom implanted neural interfaces. However, any person who believes the brain chip is useful to their field of work is welcome to collaborate.

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