Firefox

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has developed a non-invasive coherent optical system capable of recording neural signals in humans. To expand this foundational technology and enable the development of revolutionary, non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), DARPA's Firefox program is soliciting approaches to overcome key technological hurdles: 1) development of components enabling dynamic rastering/scanning of the incoming coherent optical signal to target multiple regions of interest and 2) development of new data processing architectures beyond the digital domain to handle the high data rates and computational burden inherent to scaling the amount of neural data recorded by the optical system. The ultimate goal of the Firefox program is to use these innovations to develop a 100-channel, non-invasive BCI with 50-micron spatial and 100-microsecond temporal resolution.