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John O | July 2017

DARPA seeking a future for electronics beyond Moores Law


the u.s. department of defense has allocated $75 million for the defense advanced research projects agency (darpa) to fund an electronics resurgence initiative that will work with public and private entities to develop a new era of electronics not limited by the continued component miniaturization.

 


darpa’s new electronics initiative is pushing for a new era of microsystem
structures and capabilities. (darpa)

 

moore’s law, developed in 1965 by future founder of intel gordon moore, states that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits doubles every year and predicts that this will continue into the foreseeable future.

 

darpa is being tasked with looking beyond that future.

 

according to the announcement, “the initiative seeks to undergird a new era of electronics in which advances in performance will be catalyzed not just by continued component miniaturization but also by radically new microsystem materials, designs, and architectures.”

 

the initiative comes at what darpa has labeled “an inflection point” in the manufacture and design of microelectronics, where the limits of space are catching up to designers and it will no longer suffice to try and place as many electronics as possible into smaller and smaller packages.

 

“for nearly 70 years, the united states has enjoyed the economic and security advantages that have come from national leadership in electronics innovation,” said bill chappell, director of darpa’s microsystems technology office (mto), which will lead the new effort.

 

“if we want to remain out front, we need to foment an electronics revolution that does not depend on traditional methods of achieving progress. that’s the point of this new initiative – to embrace progress through circuit specialization and to wrangle the complexity of the next phase of advances, which will have broad implications on both commercial and national defense interests.”

 

the development of the integrated circuit can be traced back to jack kilby and texas instruments in the 1950s and there have been numerous advancements in the technology over the past 60 years but darpa argues that this era of miniaturization “has always been destined to encounter the limitations of both physics and economics.”

 

“by focusing on the development of new materials for use in electronic devices,” the announcement continued, “new architectures for integrating those devices into complex circuits, and software and hardware design innovations for transforming microsystem designs into reality far more efficiently than ever before, the initiative aims to ensure continued improvements in electronics performance even without the benefit of traditional scaling.”

 

darpa will engage the electronics community through a series of discussions, workshops, and other means of communication to collaborate on a new path of innovation. this will include research into new materials for next-generation circuits and logic and memory components, as well as an examination of the architecture of circuit structures to optimize functionality.

 

“the proliferation and increasing sophistication of microelectronics—and the computing, communications, navigation, and countless other technologies that depend on those electronics—have been astounding, and have primarily happened with essentially the same silicon-based approach,” said chappell.

 

“we are looking forward to working with the commercial sector, the defense industrial base, academia, the national laboratories, and other hotbeds of innovation to initiate the next electronics revolution.”

 

according to an article in ee times, the first summit was held on july 11 in washington, d. c. and was limited to 65 executives, mostly from defense contractors. a two-day workshop will be held in san jose, calif. on july 18-19.

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