Cortical Modem Systems Integration and Packaging
https://www.sbir.gov/node/736761
Agency:  Department of Defense
Branch:  Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Program | Phase | Year:  SBIR | Phase I | 2015
Solicitation:  DoD 2015.2 SBIR Solicitation
Topic Number:  SB152-002
NOTE: The Solicitations and topics listed on this site are copies from the various SBIR agency solicitations and are not necessarily the latest and most up-to-date. For this reason, you should use the agency link listed below which will take you directly to the appropriate agency server where you can read the official version of this solicitation and download the appropriate forms and rules.
 
Release Date:  April 24, 2015, Application Due Date:  June 24, 2015
Open Date:  May 22, 2015, Close Date:  June 24, 2015
 
Description:  The DoD has a critical need for breakthrough medical therapies to treat wounded warriors with multiple comorbidities of sensory organs. This topic seeks to integrate state-of-the-art electronics, packaging, and passivation technologies with the latest low-power data and power delivery semiconductor components in a single package. In other words, DARPA seeks to wirelessly bridge cortical neural activity sensing components within the skull to external computing and network systems, designing an effective “Cortical Modem” that connects human brains to computer equipment and networks in a direct analogy to early telephonic modems, which connected computers to the ARPANET.
 
DARPA is open to a multiplicity of system architectures that, first and foremost, demonstrate significant improvements in the scale of neural channel bandwidth from the current 100-signal demonstrations, but secondly, may span a wide spectrum of implementation strategies from high-bandwidth transmission systems with limited implantable computation capability, to implantable integrated analysis and compression systems coupled to a limited bandwidth telemetry systems.
 
Significant advances in the miniaturization and ever lower-power performance of electronic and photonic technologies have enabled critical developments in miniaturized communications products like cellular phones. However, the time lag between such advances and their adoption in the fields of neuroscience and neuro-engineering has, in many cases, grown to more than twenty years. With such large interface component feature sizes characteristic of the older technologies in common experimental use, the supporting interface electronics have now become one of the most significant and fundamental limits to their integration within human and animal bodies.
 
For example, the Utah array features a 400 micrometer electrode pitch, a limitation compounded by the wet etch microfabrication technology available to the manufacturer. Note that this 400 micron feature size is representative of 1980s CMOS technologies, and is too coarse for interfacing with, for example, the visual cortex where neural pitch ranges from ten to thirty microns. As the mobile computing industry continues to push miniaturization, functionality, and power-consumption requirements to their limits, so too is the field of neuroscience pushing ever closer to full-duplex single-neuron scale interfaces. With focused technology development and integration to build a Cortical Modem, the necessary critical electronics and packaging could be leveraged across the entire academic and corporate neuroscience ecosystem to result in dramatically accelerated advances in science and commercialization of neuroscience technologies.
 
The goal of this topic is to develop cortical modem components that substantially improve the scale of signal transduction from the current 10x10 electronic probe arrays, as well as the scale of telemetry delivery of those signals., For reference purposes, one mm^3 volume of cortical tissue encloses approximately 100,000 neurons indicating an eventual need to both transduce and deliver wireless telemetry for as many as 10^7 independent neural channels. Proposals should target the design and implementation of a COTS-based full duplex cortical interface component. Essential elements of this component include flexible direct electronic interfaces to neural activity, sensors and low power pre-processing circuitry to convert and encode neural sensor signals into formats that can be transmitted wirelessly across the skull, wireless telemetry suitable for safe use in humans, and power delivery electronics.
 
Packaging must leverage state-of-the-art miniaturized single system-on-a-chip ceramic packaging that incorporates on-board wireless power reception and conditioning circuitry. Critical to the design of the system is a careful power and link budget analysis to account for relevant FDA and FCC regulations. In addition, proposals should detail the intended components (i.e. make, model, and part numbers), their interface design, and the technical and mechanical specifications that will ultimately yield the lowest power, smallest form-factor, highest signal-to-noise ratio and bandwidth system possible using COTS components. Critical systems integration challenges must be addressed explicitly in the proposal.
 
Technical challenges and considerations include system power, transmission bandwidth, frequency and data rates, transmission protocols, optical wavelengths, etc. Offerors are to first uncover and understand the critical integration challenges that may limit the translation and commercial-viability of full-duplex cortical interfaces, and second to push the standards of integration by producing a first generation of truly miniaturized and implantable interface componentry, thereby accelerating innovation across the entire field of neuro-engineering. Industrial and military collaborators should then produce products and reach their first commercialization milestones on a similarly accelerated timeline.  

Neural Engineering System Design (NESD)
Dr. Al Emondi, https://www.darpa.mil/program/neural-engineering-system-design

The Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program seeks to develop high-resolution neurotechnology capable of mitigating the effects of injury and disease on the visual and auditory systems of military personnel. In addition to creating novel hardware and algorithms, the program conducts research to understand how various forms of neural sensing and actuation might improve restorative therapeutic outcomes.
The focus of the program is development of advanced neural interfaces that provide high signal resolution, speed, and volume data transfer between the brain and electronics, serving as a translator for the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain and the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology. The program aims to develop an interface that can read 10⁶ neurons, write to 10⁵ neurons, and interact with 10³ neurons full-duplex, a far greater scale than is possible with existing neurotechnology.
To succeed, NESD requires integrated breakthroughs across disciplines including neuroscience, low-power electronics, photonics, medical device packaging and manufacturing, systems engineering, and clinical testing. In addition to hardware, NESD performer teams are developing advanced mathematical and neuro-computation techniques to first transcode high-definition sensory information between electronic and cortical neuron representations and then compress and represent those data with minimal loss of fidelity and functionality.
If the program is successful, the work has the potential to significantly advance scientists' understanding of the neural underpinnings of vision, hearing, and speech and could eventually lead to new treatments for injured Service members living with sensory deficits. Additionally, NESD tools could yield new understanding of the architecture and processing of highly integrated neural circuits.

In 2001 and 2002, Michael Patrick Murray and five other people, all of whom had brain tumors located beneath where they had held their cell phones, sued the telecommunications industry for damages. In 2010 and 2011, seven more brain cancer victims joined the case as additional plaintiffs.

The defendants represent most of the American telecommunications industry: Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, Bell South, Bell Atlantic, Motorola, Qualcomm, Samsung, SONY, Sanyo, Nokia, the CTIA, the FCC, and dozens of other telecom companies.

Through extensive maneuvering and delaying tactics by the defendants, this important case has bounced back and forth from court to court for twenty years like a ping pong ball. It went from D.C. Superior Court, to U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, to U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, back to D.C. Superior Court, up to the D.C. Court of Appeals, back to D.C. Superior Court, back up to the D.C. Court of Appeals, and back to D.C. Superior Court.

This summer, despite the fact that many of the plaintiffs are no longer alive, Murray v. Motorola will finally go to trial. Expert witness are scheduled to testify before Judge Alfred S. Irving from July 12-23, 2021. If the judge rules that the witnesses are qualified, then they will later testify before a jury.

Dr. Portier’s report was submitted to the court on March 1, 2021.

 

1. We are asking our Senators and Congressmen to hold Joint Hearings on the use of intrusive and destructive pulsed, microwave radiofrequencies, as there are thousands and thousands of us being surreptitiously accosted. We need to shed abundant sunshine on this heinous crime, that is being obfuscated and ignored; discrediting people who are reporting it, much like the initial reaction to the United States diplomats’ and the eight undercover CIA officers’ reports were, when stationed at their posts in Havana, Cuba.
2. We are asking that the 50 State Attorney Generals create and establish a dedicated phone line for reporting of this crime. There are that many of us!
3. We are asking that the 94 Federal Judicial District Prosecutors order investigations and schedule Grand Jury Hearings, to bring the criminals who are perpetrating this crime, to justice and bring relief to the normal, law abiding citizens, who have been enduring these heinous, extrajudicial, surreptitiously meeted out assaults.

 

Keeping the faith in the heat of battle in the new warfare and new form of civil war, I remain, Elana Freeland, MA

 

 

 

Targeted NJ Activism Network

T: @soundenemyx

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