We are thrilled to announce the launch of a groundbreaking suite of products designed to form a modern tech stack for neural engineering: Axon probes, the SciFi headstage, the Synapse Protocol, and Science Nexus.
While each of these products were designed to meet the rigors of our own research, we believe they represent capabilities not otherwise readily available. By providing researchers with the tools they need to collect, process, and analyze neural data more effectively, we aim to empower our colleagues in their own discoveries about the brain and its functions. We believe these products and their descendants will accelerate innovation and reduce complexity and cost across the industry.
SciFi Headstage
At the heart of the ecoystem is our SciFi headstage (launch announcement), a new kind of edge computing device that interfaces between active neural probes and application users on the network. Essentially a small smartphone, it provides power, some specialized neural signal processing, and a network connection to the probe. An OLED display and three buttons allow the user to see configuration and status information and select WiFi networks.
Axon Probes
Our fully assembled Axon probes build on our versatile Foundry fab processes and Nixel and Pixel chips. Simply plug in a USB-C cable, connect it to a SciFi, and have a ready to go, science-grade high bandwidth neural recording and stimulation system. Available in both flexible thin-film and rigid silicon formats.
Synapse Protocol
We make a wide range of neural interface devices, from in vitro multielectrode arrays to laser projection glasses for retinal stimulation. In order to facilitate both rapid experimentation and the ability to get the most out of these devices, it’s important that they all work with a single, scalable toolchain that represents a lot of development work in its own right.
To make this possible, we’ve developed Synapse, a standard API for communicating with these devices. Synapse is expressive enough to support a huge range of use cases, from closed-loop neuromodulation to retinal visual protheses to motor or speech decoding. More information is available in the Synapse launch announcement.
Science Nexus
Finally, Nexus is a graphical application and software framework for defining and running behavioral experiments, as well as dealing with the resulting mountains of data. Nexus is natively aware of Synapse-compatible neural interface devices with deep integration to detect, configure, and run them. Nexus makes it easy to define complex games and run them successfully, recording detailed instrumentation automatically. Querying out data into Jupyter for further analysis is a breeze. To be able to say much about what the neural data actually means, it must be precisely aligned to behavior. Nexus exists to facilitate that alignment over very large datasets.
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