01 / STIMULATION
Neural stimulation & modulation
Excitatory or suppressive effects at a chosen depth, set by pulse repetition frequency and duty cycle rather than by where an electrode happens to sit.
A focused wave
for the human
nervous system.
Berkeley Ultrasound builds low-intensity focused ultrasound systems for neural stimulation and modulation — millimetre-precise, non-invasive, and steerable anywhere a wave can reach.
- Carrier frequency
- 1.00 MHz
- Pulse repetition
- 16–2000 Hz
- Duty cycle
- 5–100 %
- Focal depth
- 20–80 mm
01 / The field
Sound is the only tool that reaches the whole brain without cutting it.
Focused ultrasound passes through skin and bone and converges on a target a few millimetres across. No implant, no incision, no ionising radiation — just constructive interference, aimed.
02 / TARGETING
Millimetre-scale focus
A curved phased array steers its focal volume electronically. Element timing follows the focusing delay law, so the aperture can be re-aimed without moving the hardware.
03 / THERAPEUTICS
Therapeutic applications
Acoustic radiation force, localised heating, and streaming in tissue — the mechanical effects that make ultrasound useful well beyond imaging.
04 / RESEARCH
Consciousness research
Instrumentation for the open questions — mood, attention, and the microtubule hypotheses that first put ultrasound in front of consciousness science.
02 / Simulation
Watch a pulse cross the medium.
A real-time acoustic solver running in a fragment shader: a pulse train leaves the transducer face, attenuates through the medium, reflects off an impedance mismatch, and casts an acoustic shadow behind it. Change the duty cycle and the whole field responds.
Transducer idle — press begin transmit to energise the array
- State
- STANDBY
- Duty cycle
- 5%
- Mechanical index
- 0.31
- Spatial-peak intensity
- 38 mW/cm²
- Carrier
- 1.00 MHz
Cycle the intensity to compare 5%, 50% and 100% duty. Higher duty deposits more energy per unit time — visible as brighter reflections off the ellipsoid and a deeper acoustic shadow behind it.
03 / Research
Built on a lineage, not a launch.
Principal
Sterling Cooley
Discuss a collaboration →
Founder, Berkeley Ultrasound. Working with neurotech laboratories on ultrasound brain stimulation hardware and protocol design.
Berkeley Ultrasound is the applied engineering arm of a much older line of enquiry. The work extends research associated with Dr. Stuart Hameroff's studies in consciousness and brain stimulation, and it is carried out in collaboration with leading neurotech facilities rather than in isolation.
What we contribute is instrumentation. Protocols are only as trustworthy as the hardware that delivers them, and the hardware is only as trustworthy as the field it actually produces — which is why every device we build is paired with a solver that predicts that field before a transducer is ever energised.
The simulations on this page are not decoration. They are the same acoustic models we use to place a focus, estimate a mechanical index, and decide whether a given aperture can reach a given target at all.
A
Field prediction before hardware
Pressure-field solvers for aperture design, focal placement, and safety envelope — validated against hydrophone measurement.
B
Protocol parameterisation
Frequency, pulse repetition, duty cycle and burst duration treated as first-class experimental variables, logged per session.
C
Open instrumentation
Where possible the toolchain ships open, so a result obtained on our hardware can be reproduced on someone else's.
04 / Licensing
Take the stack, or take a piece of it.
The transducer designs, drive electronics and acoustic solvers are available for licensing and implementation. Four routes in, depending on how much of it you need.
01
Commercial licensing
Full transfer of transducer and drive-stage designs for integration into a commercial device programme.
02
Open source
Solvers and reference firmware released openly so academic groups can reproduce and extend the work.
03
Technical consultation
Aperture design, focal targeting, dosimetry and safety-envelope review for an existing programme.
04
Research partnership
Co-developed studies where we supply the instrumentation and share the protocol design work.
Connect
Tell us what you need to reach.
A target depth, a study design, a device programme that has stalled on the acoustics — those are the conversations worth having. Reach out and we will tell you honestly whether ultrasound is the right instrument for it.