Video Transcript – Cantley’s ENDS Lab Tour

Hi everyone! I’m Dr. Kurtis Cantley from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering here at Boise State University and I’m going to show you my lab. The ENDS lab – The Electronic and Neuromorphic Devices and Systems. Come on in!

So the primary focus of our research group is to do neurotrophic engineering which is building electronic devices and circuits that behave like the brain and perform computations like the brain. So part of that involves sometimes manufacturing or creating or fabricating custom semi conductor devices. So that would be in our clean room downstairs, The Idaho Microfabrication Lab. And then bringing them up here to a microprobe station to test them and measure their electrical behavior for simulations or modeling purposes or for integration into other circuits and components.

So in our lab one of the things we have is a pretty large microprobe station, obviously contained inside of a black box faraday cage for grounding purposes to minimize electromagnetic noise and light interference. And so we have several microprobes in here and a high powered microscope to be able to look at your sample, place the probes, and then connect over to our rack of Agilent characterization equipment right over here, which includes your normal semi conductor parameter analyzer as well as the oscilloscopes and function generators.

So this rack also connects to another custom probe station over here which is primarily used for electrophysiology, obviously also contained within a black box Faraday cage with a heated stage that will warm samples up to 37C biological temperatures and micro positioners as well as micro probe positioners.

So what we’ll typically do is create a reservoir with a fluid salt solution fluid inside of there where we can culture neuron cells and bring them here, put them on the stage, and actually measure their electrical properties of the cells themselves and put those on neural interfaces and measure the properties of the neural interface also.

So we can do that with a patch clamp system in collaboration with Dr. Dave Estrada from Materials Science and Engineering as well as Dr. Brad Morrison from Biological Sciences.

So over here we have our fume hood inside of this lab as well. It’s mostly used for surface preparation and sample cleaning right now although we have done traditionally some flexible electronics in here. So we have a spin coater, micro, and you know, it’s mostly just handling solvents and polymers.

We’ve got several open lab benches right now because of the recent move we haven’t maybe fully expanded into this space. But right now mostly we are doing the testing of neural networks and spiking neural networks right here which is you know, if you know the inter connectivity of the brain is very dense and there are a lot of connections between neurons, which is why you sort of see a mess of wires inside of our electronic or outside of our electronic neural network. But you know the way this works is that typically you will apply signals, measure the outputs of the neurons, and we’ve got several ways to do that including traditional function generators and oscilloscopes. But also more specialized equipment like the National Instruments PXI Chassis that has a 64 channel arbitrary wave form generator. So we can apply a lot of different realistic signals in real time to our neural network and then measure the outputs and the response of the network.

And then of course there are two components to this. Number one is designing a chip and sending that out to a foundry and having it taped out and getting it back. And then the second part is integrating that into a larger system on a printed circuit board. And so when we do that and do printed circuit board design, you know this a typical sobering station over here where we’ve got all of the surface mount components and through hole components and jumper wires and header pins and everything necessary to really integrate these different systems together.

So as you can see we’ve got a lot of room to expand in this lab and a lot of interesting projects going on and definitely I am always looking for great students to come and work in the ENDS Lab. So if you are interested please go ahead and contact me and reach out and I would be happy to talk to you.