DARPA (BTO): Firefox

DARPA is soliciting innovative approaches to address overcome key technological hurdles in the following technical areas:

1) development of components enabling dynamic rastering/scanning of the incoming coherent optical signal to target multiple regions of interest

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.

Technical Area 1 seeks to develop prototype scalable components, or system of components that can dynamically steer/raster coherent light across an operationally relevant sensing volume.

Technical Area 2 involves developing scalable prototype architectures capable of processing the optical speckle data from each time sample of each rastered channel in the analog domain.

Funding: $4,000,000 to $7,000,000 total 

Duration:  3 years 

Research Authority due date: 12.10.26

Abstract (required) due date: 19.10.26

Oral Proposal Package due date: 9.11.26