Thermal budget at high channel count

The limit on how much power an implant may dissipate before it heats surrounding neural tissue unacceptably. Chronic-safety guidance commonly cited in the field keeps steady-state tissue temperature rise on the order of about one degree Celsius, corresponding to power-density limits of roughly tens of milliwatts per square centimetre, though exact thresholds depend on site, perfusion, and duration and remain debated.

This budget scales poorly: total power grows with the number of amplifiers, the digitisation rate, and especially the wireless data rate, so a naive high-channel design can exceed the thermal limit long before it runs out of silicon. Thermal budget therefore ties the whole field together — it constrains channel count, forces on-implant compression to cut telemetry power, and rewards ultra-low-power and neuromorphic front-ends that decode locally instead of streaming raw data.