Communications of the ACM
Beyond Silicon: $1.5-billion .S. Program Aims to Spur New Types of Computer Chips
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has announced $75 million in grants under a program that aims to reinvigorate the chip industry with research into new designs and materials.
Credit: Stanford Engineering
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced $75 million in new grants to revitalize the computer chip industry via fundamental research into new designs and materials.
The program is expected to grow to as much as $300 million in grants per year, or $1.5 billion over five years.
One grant recipient is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Max Shulaker, who is researching carbon nanotube-based transistors incorporated into three-dimensional (3D) chips. His team is developing 3D chips with features 10 times larger than state-of-the-art silicon chips, boasting a 50-fold upgrade in speed and energy efficiency.
Another focus of the DARPA program is flexible chip architectures, with Arizona State University's Daniel Bliss using a grant to improve wireless communications with chips capable of on-the-fly reconfiguration for specialized tasks. Bliss envisions his work on radio chips that blend and filter signals using software instead of hardware enabling interference-free, multi-device signal transmission and reception.
Stanford University's Subhasish Mitra says DARPA's program has the potential to "completely revolutionize how we design electronics."
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