Microsystems Technology Office

The Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) aims to ensure the U.S.’s continued technological dominance, both militarily and economically. To do this, MTO pushes today’s boundaries in foundational science to create transformational impact for tomorrow. 

This involves going beyond incremental improvements to existing technologies and seeking fundamental scientific breakthroughs that can create new capabilities and reshape entire industries.

Whitney Mason, office director of the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), discusses how MTO seeks revolutionary advances versus evolutionary capabilities.

Thrust Areas

Our three major focus areas address distinct challenges but also build upon and reinforce one another:

Circuit Development to Enable Next-generation Microsystems
We are developing technology to enable fundamentally new ways of creating useful circuits, specifically:

• Photonic Circuits (PCs): While photonics is not new to our office, there is still much to explore through using the power of light at the chip-scale. We are looking at expanding the use of photonic interconnects, examining new materials and wavelengths, and designing new architectures.
• Quantum Circuits (QCs): Quantum phenomena offer potentially dramatic improvements over classical computing and sensing. We are attempting to explore nearer-term to longer-term instantiations of quantum technology to reduce the possibility of commercial surprise, drive the discovery of new hardware metrics, and invent scalable devices.
• Organic Circuits (OCs): Biological and organic systems engage in complex computation and sensing activities every day at an efficiency and effectiveness that often dwarves its inorganic counterparts. We are seeking ways to enable the integration of biomolecules and micro-technologies, establish the viability of molecular integrated circuits, and explore hybrid bio-sensing and bio-compute microsystems.

Microsystems Manufacturing Ecosystem
We are building the infrastructure necessary to producing and improving advanced microsystems. 

To achieve this, we are exploring new additive, subtractive, and combination fabrication tools and technologies to enable sustainable manufacturing, technologies to speed up time to market, and foundational ecosystem enhancements with far-reaching impact beyond the new circuits of tomorrow.

Dual-use by Design
We are developing technologies with both military and commercial applications, focusing on innovations that not only strengthen national security but also enhance the U.S. economy. 

We are exploring new capabilities in design, integration, and hardware security that can take advantage of commercial scaling while also establishing differentiating capabilities in defense microsystems.