HSINCHU, Taiwan — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in collaborations with National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in making a chipset for controlling brainwaves of Epilepsy that is one of the most common neurological disorders, by which around 1% of the people in the world are affected.
Unfortunately, 25 percent of the epilepsy patients cannot be treated sufficiently by antiepileptic drugs and epilepsy surgery. If seizures cannot be well controlled, the patients experience major limitations in their lives. Above reason has become the motivation of NCTU and TSMC cooperates on the chipset for restraining brainwaves of Epilepsy.
“We have been working on this chipset with TSMC for almost 6 years,” said Wu Chong-yu, a Professor of the Dept. of Electronic Engineering in NCTU, “firstly, we designed the chipset, then TSMC to manufacture it.”
“The hardest part is that we gotta do animal experiment for testing the chipset, we fed a bunch of epileptic guinea pigs and placed the chipset onto them. However, sensoring and decoding the epileptic brainwaves are not an easy job so that we invented a very good algorithm to do so.” Professor Wu added.
Afer successfully conducting the animal experiment, manufacturing in TSMC is going to be the next stage. “Since the sudden occuring of epileptic seizures can be fatal, we invented this chipset that can take actions within one second, which resulted in the chipset sending electric waves to the brain, and stop epileptic seizures from happening.”
The manufacture of the chipset is still ongoing, the exact release date is still unknown, but the coopereation between TSMC and NCTU has already penned a milestone in Taiwan technical and medical history.
