May 14, 2026
Buoyed by a $1.4 million grant, Raghavendra Pothukuchi (far left in photo above) is working to develop an implantable brain-computer interface built around a custom microchip. Such a BCI will allow the brain’s electrical activity to be processed to enable better study and monitoring of the brain, as well as assistance or even enhancement of cognitive and sensory-motor functions. To support his work, he has led a growth in chip design infrastructure at UNC-Chapel Hill.
The human brain controls all activity and thought through billions of neurons that communicate using electrical impulses. By monitoring these electrical signals, we can map and monitor brain activity to learn more about how it functions. By providing our own electrical feedback, we can help compensate for lost or weakened abilities, treat diseases, and one day access information across the internet with just our minds. This is the goal of Assistant Professor Raghavendra Pothukuchi, whose research builds systems that can directly interface with the brain, decode its underlying thoughts and memories, and communicate with it using electrical feedback. Pothukuchi refers to his work as building the “infinite brain.”
One of the most important aspects of this research is the hardware platform. Pothukuchi is building the hardware for a brain-computer interface (BCI) that can be implanted in a user’s head to enable many of these tasks. The chip Pothukuchi is developing must be able to process more than 100 megabits of neural data per second, while consuming fewer than 100 milliwatts of power, which is comparable to the power consumption of a Bluetooth earbud. Ultra-HD video streaming operates at only a few megabits per second, so processing an order of magnitude more bandwidth at that power level is beyond the capability of any platform that currently exists.
Pothukuchi recognized early on that building such a platform would require an enhancement of chip design resources at UNC. Working with the Department of Computer Science and UNC Research Computing, Pothukuchi is bringing industry chip design software to campus and setting up tool workflows on shared university infrastructure that are inspired by his industry work at Nvidia.
Pothukuchi’s chip design work is part of a multi-institutional project that aims to deliver a validated BCI system to neuroscience labs at UNC-Chapel Hill and across the country by 2028. The project is led by Principal investigator Abhishek Bhattacharjee, a professor of computer science at Yale University, and also features co-principal investigator Hitten P. Zaveri, a professor of neuroscience at Yale. The project began when Pothukuchi was an associate research scientist at Yale University and is funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant worth $1.4 million, of which $1.18 million will transfer to UNC to support chip design work. He has already brought a full-time engineer, two graduate students, and 30 undergraduate students into the project, and he looks forward to seeing how the infrastructure will be used by other groups and departments in the future. He has already heard there are student engineering clubs unaffiliated with his work that have expressed interest in the technology.
Earlier this year, Pothukuchi and his fellow researchers tested a prototype of their neural processing platform during two live surgeries at the Yale New Haven Hospital. During a surgical operation on two patients with Parkinson’s disease, the platform was able to identify the frequency of neural signals sensed by an electrode inserted into the brain.
Pothukuchi said the work was intense to get the design correct, verify it, make it configurable to match the dynamic needs in the operating room, and to tailor the information to the surgeon’s needs. That said, he and his collaborators were very excited with the outcome of the test.
“We have a long way to go—from the design to better visualizing our results in a stressful surgery environment for the doctors and us—but this milestone conveys surgeon confidence and proves the validity and reliability of our system,” Pothukuchi said.
Pothukuchi is now working with colleagues from the UNC School of Medicine to run future validations of the platform as it is built with UNC Hospitals and the UNC Neuroscience Center, ensuring that the new platform meets the needs of cutting-edge scientific and medical research. The validation work involves Department of Neurosurgery Associate Professor Vibhor Krishna and Assistant Professor Amol Yadav, as well as UNC Neuroscience Center Associate Professor Adam Hantman.
The project, titled “Development of BrainScan: An Instrument for High-Bandwidth Real-Time Closed-Loop Neural Interfacing, is funded as part of NSF’s Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program. Information about the grant is available on the NSF website.