DARPA’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative Enters Second Phase; Bill Chappell Quoted

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched the second phase of a potential five-year, $1.5B program that aims to advance microelectronics innovation through new microsystem designs, materials and architectures.

DARPA said Thursday the Electronics Resurgence Initiative’s Phase II seeks to address the need to support domestic production options to advance capability development for diverse needs; advance investments in chip security; and demonstrate the resulting technology platforms in defense applications.

The electronics community raised such requirements during the ERI Summit held in July in San Francisco.

For ERI’s initial phase, DARPA selected in July multiple research teams to perform work under the initiative’s six “Page 3” programs that seek to address innovation challenges in the microelectronics field.

“Through ERI, DARPA is seeding the foundation of a more robust, secure, and heavily automated electronics industry to move us from an era of generalized hardware to specialized systems,” Bill Chappell, director of DARPA’s microsystems technology office.

Chappell noted that ERI’s second phase aims to “push us toward a domestic semiconductor manufacturing sector that can implement specialized circuits; demonstrate that those circuits can be trusted through the supply chain and are built with security in mind; and are ultimately available to both DoD and commercial sector users.”

DARPA said Phase II aims to develop unique local manufacturing capabilities by studying the addition of alternative and complementary vectors to CMOS scaling through initiatives including the Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability program.