This year Design Automation Conference (DAC) started on Sunday with a number of Workshops. One in particular attracted my attention: Biochips to Interface and Monitor Human Biological Functions. Organized by past-chair Dr. Steven Levitan, it featured a keynote speech by Dr.Jan Rabey.

During the speech, I realized that the issues Dr. Rabey was describing were neither new, nor peculiar to the problems of monitoring human biological functions. He told that one of the major issues to be addressed in monitoring brain activity is to isolate a specific signal from the surrounding noise. As a participant in the SETI project, I am very familiar with the problem radio astronomer face in identifying a specific signal from the background noise surrounding it. And Berkeley has played a major role in the project. Had no one realized the similarity?

But the problem is even older than radio astronomy. Thirty years ago, Navy teams, working on the development of a sonar system, were faced with the inability to model the characteristics of the sea that impacted the quality of the echo signal from the sonar. The problem has not changed, because reality has not changed. We live in an analog world, and a noisy world at that. Although frequency and amplitude change with the application, the problem of finding and understanding a specific signal immersed in a noisy background with similar physical characteristics, continues to complicate the lives of electronic engineers.

In the case of the brain, the electrical discharge from a neuron produces a very weak signal. But, I mused, how much weaker is it than the signal we now receive from Voyager 1, from the outer boundaries of the solar system?

The sonar system was built and it worked, we can receive Voyager's signal, and thus there is a way to listen to a single neuron. Some time, it pays to look back in time, to methods other people have used, even outside our specific field, and not just believe we are addressing new problems, just because the tools we use to implement the solution are new.