The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has chosen multiple research teams from the commercial and academic sectors to address microelectronics innovation challenges as part of an initiative worth up to $1.5 billion over five years.DARPA said Tuesday the Electronics Resurgence Initiative covers six “Page 3” programs that seek to explore new materials, circuit design tools and systems architectures intended to increase the performance of microelectronics technology.
Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC), Cadence Systems and nine universities will participate in the Intelligent Design of Electronic Assets program. IDEA aims to produce a layout generator designed to help users design electronic hardware within a 24-hour period.
Ten groups will aim to create an open source system for the design and verification of ultra-complex system-on-chip platforms as part of the Posh Open Source Hardware effort.
The agency chose five universities as well as Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVIDIA), Qualcomm, Systems & Technology Research to conduct studies under the Software Defined Hardware program.
IBM (NYSE: IBM), Oak Ridge National Laboratory and two universities will take on research challenges through the Domain-specific System on Chip effort.
SDH and DSSoC teams will study methods to co-optimize hardware and software without the use of a complex programming system.
Skywater Technology Foundry, Georgia Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology will work to integrate processes into an existing foundry under the Three Dimensional Monolithic System-on-a-Chip program.
DARPA tapped HRL Laboratories, Applied Materials, Ferris and three universities to design circuits that will leverage new materials and integration techniques to facilitate data processing as part of the Foundations Required for Novel Compute effort.
