MXO

The Multi X Office (MXO) disrupts how technology is developed and used by applying the physical sciences to deliver novel, mission-relevant capabilities. Technologically, MXO operates across scales and disciplines; operationally, it spans functions and domains.

Announcing the expansion of the Microsystems Technology Office into the Multi X Office (MXO). | 0:53
Source: DARPA | Tim Byrne

The Office of Tiny Things With Huge Impact

Built on decades of breakthroughs pioneered by DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office, MXO carries this legacy forward while evolving to meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving technological and strategic landscape. 

MXO explores materials at the atomic, molecular, and cellular scales to develop new components, tools, and processes that transform both the future battlespace and tomorrow’s economies. It advances breakthrough technologies that displace existing capabilities while also harnessing commercial innovation to deliver asymmetric advantages in today’s operational environment. 

By expanding and scaling the foundational component hardware, tools, and processes across domains, applications, and architectures, MXO enables new missions and catalyzes the economies of the future.

Thrust Areas

MXO’s beyond-the-headlights strategy requires its technical thrust areas to continually evolve in anticipation of emerging challenges. Across all areas of interest, MXO prioritizes breakthroughs that enable fundamentally new capabilities; incremental improvements to the current state of the art need not apply.

Materials and Components to Expand the Foundation

Materials, devices, and their integration underpin the modern battlespace, but today’s CMOS-centric foundation is increasingly vulnerable to disruption and exploitation. MXO seeks to establish new foundations beyond CMOS that enable resilient, secure, and attack-resistant systems. The office is interested in ideas that invent and enable the scalable production of foundational hardware for enduring military and economic advantage.

Tools and Processes for Indigenous Development

Indigenous tools, processes, and material supply chains are critical to national and economic security. MXO seeks to strengthen industrial resilience by advancing new tools, processes, and capabilities that enable domestic development, establish new supply chains, and/or reduce reliance on vulnerable supply chains. The office is interested in ideas that help create new technology sectors, reinforce industrial sovereignty, and enable the United States to design, build, and scale critical technologies at home.

New Modalities to Achieve Mission Effects

Sensing, orienting, computing, and communicating are essential to modern operations, but mission effects need not rely solely on traditional electronics. MXO seeks new technological modalities that deliver mission effects in ways that are more resilient to current and emerging vulnerabilities. Areas of interest include (but are not limited to) devices leveraging new physics, hybrid electronic and non-electronic approaches that produce effects greater than the sum of its parts, and entirely new approaches to achieve mission effects that breakthrough existing paradigms’ constraints.