Failure Analysis on Neural Implants
I've spent pretty much my entire career working on one instrument, the Focused Ion Beam (FIB). I'm a FIBber! FIB's are really useful for failure analysis. And when I talk about failure analysis, I'm not referring to sitting around and thinking about my life...No, I'm talking about failure analysis on microelectronics! FIB's allow you to cut tiny things open and look inside of them with an electron microscope. Lately I've been doing some failure analysis on neural implants. We'd really like to understand how and why they fail, as well as how long it takes before they start failing so that we know what to expect before we stick them in humans. Ideally, if you are going to go through all the trouble of opening up your head and putting some electronics in your brain, you want it to work for the rest of your life. And when you think about it, your brain is a pretty harsh environment for electronics. I mean think about it, would you expect your iPhone to wo...
