Patrick Fath

What I do

I design microchips, the little pieces of silicon about the size of a fingernail that sit inside every phone, car and hearing aid. Mine have one job. They listen. Nerves and muscles talk to each other with tiny electrical pulses of a few millionths of a volt, roughly a million times weaker than the voltage of a AA battery. My chips pick up these whispers right on the body, clean them up, turn them into numbers and send them out wirelessly with radio pulses that are shorter than a billionth of a second. All of that has to work on almost no power, because there is no room for a battery. One of my chips gets by on less than a millionth of a watt per measurement channel and charges wirelessly through the air. At the moment I am working towards 1024 channels at once, which means 64 of these chips talking to one receiver without shouting over each other. I build that receiver station as well. A lot of this happens with open source design tools, so anyone who is curious can look at the designs, learn from them and reuse them.

Why it matters

The personal reason is easy. There is a moment when an amplifier that lived for months as nothing but lines on my screen suddenly hears a real heartbeat in the lab. That never gets old. The bigger reason is that the more channels you can listen to at once, the sharper the picture of what the nerves are actually saying. Prosthetic hands controlled by thought, better epilepsy diagnostics and a way to communicate for people who can neither speak nor move all depend on exactly that. Right now those systems are held back by cables and by power consumption. My job is to get rid of both.

Further reading