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Microsystems Technology Office (MTO)

Advanced integrated circuitry.

The Microsystems Technology Office’s (MTO) core mission is to develop high-performance intelligent microsystems and next-generation components to ensure U.S. dominance in the areas of Command, Control, Communications, Computing, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR), Electronic Warfare (EW), and Directed Energy (DE). The effectiveness, survivability, and lethality of these systems depend critically on the microsystems contained inside. More

Highlights

DARPA Electronics Resurgence Initiative

DARPA Electronics Resurgence Initiative

In June 2017, DARPA announced the Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) as a bold response to several technical and economic trends in the microelectronics sector. Among these trends, the rapid increase in the cost and complexity of advanced microelectronics design and manufacture is challenging a half-century of progress under Moore’s Law, prompting a need for alternative approaches to traditional transistor scaling.
Real Time Machine Learning

Designing Chips for Real Time Machine Learning

The Real Time Machine Learning (RTML) program aims to reduce the design costs associated with developing ASICs tailored for emerging ML applications by developing a means of automatically generating novel chip designs based on ML frameworks.
Circuits We Can Trust

A DARPA Approach to Trusted Microelectronics

Microelectronics support nearly all Department of Defense (DoD) activities, enabling capabilities such as the global positioning system, radar, command and control, and communications. Ensuring secure access to leading-edge microelectronics, however, is a challenge. The changing global semiconductor industry and the sophistication of U.S. adversaries, who might target military electronic components, suggest the need for an updated microelectronics security framework.

Tags

| Agency | Decentralization | Electronics | EW | Globalization | Microsystems | Mobile | Photonics | PNT | Spectrum |

 

Opportunities

To view a selective listing of solicitations posted by this office please visit the MTO Opportunities page, where you can further sort by topic.

Programs

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Atomic Clock with Enhanced Stability (ACES)

Dr. John Burke
Precise timing is essential across DoD systems, including communications, navigation, electronic warfare, intelligence systems reconnaissance, and system-of-systems platform coordination, as well as in national infrastructure applications in commerce and banking, telecommunications, and power distribution. Improved clock performance throughout the timing network, particularly at point-of-use, would enable advanced collaborative capabilities and provide greater resilience to disruptions of timing synchronization networks, notably by reducing reliance on satellite-based global navigation satellite system (GNSS) timing signals. More
| Communications | Decentralization | ISR | Microsystems | PNT | Quantum |

Atomic Magnetometer for Biological Imaging In Earth’s Native Terrain (AMBIIENT)

Dr. John Burke
State-of-the-art magnetometers are used for diverse civilian and DoD applications, among them biomedical imaging, navigation, and detecting unexploded ordnance and underwater and underground anomalies. Commercially available magnetometers range from inexpensive Hall probes to highly sensitive fluxgate and atomic magnetometers to high-precision Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) and Spin Exchange Relaxation Free (SERF) magnetometers. More
| Med-Devices | Sensors | Tech-Foundations |

Circuit Realization at Faster Timescales (CRAFT)

Mr. Andreas Olofsson
It can cost up to $100 million and take more than two years for a large team of engineers to design custom integrated circuits for specific tasks, such as synchronizing the activity of unmanned aerial vehicles or the real-time conversion of raw radar data into tactically useful 3-D imagery. This is why Defense Department engineers often turn to inexpensive and readily available general-purpose circuits, and then rely on software to make those circuits run the specialized operations they need. More
| Electronics | Globalization | Microchips |

Common Heterogeneous Integration and IP Reuse Strategies (CHIPS)

Mr. Andreas Olofsson
The explosive growth in mobile and telecommunication markets has pushed the semiconductor industry toward integration of digital, analog, and mixed-signal blocks into system-on-chip (SoC) solutions. Advanced silicon (Si) complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology has enabled this integration, but has also led to a rise in costs associated with design and processing. Driven by aggressive digital CMOS scaling for high-volume products, Intellectual Property (IP) reuse has emerged as a tool to help lower design costs associated with advanced SoCs. More
| Electronics | Integration | Microchips | Microsystems | SWAP |

Digital RF Battlespace Emulator (DRBE)

Mr. Serge Leef
The Digital RF Battlespace Emulator (DRBE) program aims to create the world’s first, large-scale, virtual RF environment for developing, training, and testing advanced radio frequency (RF) systems. The DRBE system will seek to enable numerous RF systems such as radar and electronic warfare (EW) systems to interact with each other in a fully closed-loop RF environment. More
| AI | Electronics | EW | Microsystems | Systems |