  The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will be the next frontier project of nuclear
physics in the United States. It is planned to be built in the Brookhaven
National Laboratory (BNL) in close collaboration with Jefferson Lab. One of the
key requirement for the EIC central detector is excellent particle
identification (PID). A detector using the Detection of Internally Reflected
Cherenkov light (DIRC) principle, with a radial size of only 7-8~cm, is a very
attractive solution for identification of the hadrons in the final state. The
R$\&$D program performed by the EIC PID collaboration (eRD14) is focused on
designing a high-performance DIRC (hpDIRC) detector that would extend the
momentum coverage well beyond the state-of-the-art 3 standard deviations or
more separation of $\pi/K$ up to 6~GeV/$c$, $e/\pi$ up to 1.8~GeV/$c$, and
$p/K$ up to 10~GeV/$c$. Key components of the hpDIRC detector are a 3-layer
compound lens and small pixel-size photo-sensors. This article describes the
status of the high-performance DIRC R$\&$D for the EIC detector, with a focus
on efforts towards developing and validating the radiation hard 3-layer lens.
