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Dion Khodagholy at Columbia University, the solution isn’t making smaller transistors – we’ve almost hit the limit, now reaching 5nm, 1nm, 0.5nm, and even single atom scale transistors. But if you’ve tried squeezing a sleeve-protective laptop into a small bag, you’ll know that increasing bulk stretches out the bag, and in the case of Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI), brain tissue is the bag, and that can have a negative effect on the patients wellbeing. The trick therefore, at the moment at least, is to encase them in plastics that the human body can tolerate. Without modification, implanted electrodes invariably activate the brain’s immune system, resulting in scar tissue around the implantation site as the cells eagerly attack the foreign silicon invaders. The big problem though? They’re not biocompatible in the long term. To be fair, silicon transistors, when made into electrode arrays, can perform the basics, such as recording neural signals, and processing and analysing them using increasingly sophisticated programs that detect neural patterns, which in turn can be used to stimulate the brain, let ALS or Locked In patients perform Thought-to-Text, and, or control smart Neural-Prosthetics. Which, all in all, means that fashioning new hardware that conforms to and compliments our biological wetware becomes increasingly important.