.avif)
General Sense has partnered with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) — one of the United States Department of Energy's (DOE) premier national security laboratories — to develop the neural interface hardware at the core of the Nose-Computer Interface (NCI).
The collaboration, initiated under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) through LLNL's Innovation and Partnerships Office, pairs General Sense's olfactory neuroscience and machine learning capabilities with LLNL's Implantable Microsystems Group, one of the most advanced neural device fabrication teams in the world.
The partnership produced a 767-channel microelectrode array — a flexible, biocompatible polymer device thinner than tissue paper and smaller than a postage stamp. It sits on the surface of an animal's olfactory bulb and records neural firing patterns as the animal processes airborne chemical compounds.
The array represents a significant engineering milestone for LLNL. It is the first neural interface produced using the lab's new high-density nanofabrication process based on electron beam lithography, capable of patterning features at the nanometer scale. The electrode density — hundreds of channels per square millimeter — is, in LLNL's own description, "significantly denser than anything we've fabricated before."
Travis Massey, Staff Research Engineer in LLNL's Implantable Microsystems Group, leads the nanofabrication effort. His team reduced the time to test a 512-channel array from days to hours — a manufacturing efficiency gain that matters when the goal is field-deployable hardware, not one-off lab prototypes.
The partnership has a clean division of labor:
This is not a vendor relationship. It is a joint development program between a national security laboratory and a commercial technology company, structured to produce hardware that meets both the performance requirements of real-time neural decoding and the durability requirements of chronic implantation in field-deployed animals.
Building neural interfaces is not a standard contract manufacturing job. The electrode arrays used in the NCI must be biocompatible, chronically stable, mechanically flexible, and dense enough to capture the spatial resolution of olfactory bulb activity across hundreds of discrete channels. That combination of requirements puts the fabrication squarely in the domain of a handful of institutions worldwide.
LLNL's Implantable Microsystems Group has a track record in exactly this category. They have active neural interface collaborations with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and with Precision Neuroscience (a brain-computer interface company developing cortical arrays for neurodegenerative disease). The lab's neural technologies program operates dedicated cleanroom fabrication facilities purpose-built for this class of device.
For General Sense, the LLNL partnership provides two things no commercial fabrication house can offer: access to nanofabrication capabilities developed under national security R&D budgets, and an institutional partner whose quality standards are set by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) — not by commercial cost optimization.
.avif)
The upgrade from 128 to 767 electrodes is not incremental. It is the difference between reading a paragraph and reading a page. More channels means higher spatial resolution on the olfactory bulb, which means the AI models can discriminate between more compounds, at lower concentrations, against noisier chemical backgrounds.
In practical terms: the 128-electrode prototype demonstrated detection of arson accelerants, smokeless powder, methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl in controlled laboratory conditions. The 767-electrode array is designed to maintain that performance in real-world field environments — where target odors are mixed with exhaust, food, cleaning chemicals, and every other volatile compound in the air.
That transition from lab to field is where most sensing technologies fail. The LLNL partnership is how General Sense intends to survive it.
