DARPA Announces Second Annual ERI Summit

Since its official announcement on June 1, 2017, DARPA’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) has sought to advance the development of a specialized, secure, and heavily automated electronics industry. ERI – a five-year, upwards of $1.5B investment to enable far-reaching improvements in electronics performance – has fostered collaborations among the commercial electronics sector, defense industrial base, and university researchers. As ERI enters its second year, DARPA seeks to reconvene the electronics community at the second annual ERI Summit in Detroit, Michigan, July 15–17. The Summit will allow electronics innovators to share their vision for the future, review technical progress, and provide input into future research directions.

Last year’s ERI Summit gathered nearly 900 members of the electronics community in San Francisco, California for workshops, technical presentations, and compelling keynotes from industry leaders. Attendees heard from influential voices, including John Hennessy, chairman of Google parent company Alphabet; Gary Dickerson, president and CEO of Applied Materials; Mike Mayberry, CTO of Intel; Aart de Geus, co-founder and co-CEO of Synopsys; and Kristen Baldwin, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for systems engineering. During the event, DARPA unveiled the research teams selected to pursue six new DARPA programs, called “Page 3” programs for their relevance to ideas expressed on the third page of Gordon Moore’s seminal 1965 paper. Representing a commitment to new research directions in an increasingly competitive international electronics landscape, the “Page 3” programs emphasize enhancing silicon circuits with unconventional materials, building novel architectures for programmability and configurability, and dramatically lowering the barriers to circuit design.

Continuing in this vein, 2019 Summit presentations and activities will highlight the technical achievements of ERI programs, support continued research collaborations, and offer opportunities to solicit community input on new efforts. The Summit will emphasize the impact of advanced electronics for both semiconductor designers and manufacturers as well as the electronics user base, where sectors like automotive, telecommunications, and defense will increasingly rely on new technologies to maintain a competitive edge. Confirmed speakers for the 2019 Summit include Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD; Steve Mollenkopf, CEO of Qualcomm; Thomas Caulfield, CEO of GlobalFoundries; John Kelly III, executive vice president at IBM; and Bill Vass, vice president of technology at Amazon Web Services.

The 2019 ERI Summit is planned for three days of sessions, starting Monday, July 15. During the first day of the event, DARPA performers will share research milestones achieved within ERI’s foundational and Page 3 programs. This will include a session on microelectronics assurance, which will review progress on protecting advanced electronics against intellectual property and other malicious attacks, a critical need for the defense community and increasing area of commercial interest. The second day will feature technical deep dives into several ERI programs, facilitated by DARPA program managers and performers. Both days will include presentations from commercial and defense community leaders as well as poster sessions to foster collaboration. Feedback and discussions from similar workshops at the 2018 Summit contributed to the development of several new “ERI Phase II” programs. Thus, in this manner, the third day of the Summit will focus on potential future ERI investments, with several program manager-led workshops.

Event location, agenda, accommodations information, and other details can be found at www.eri-summit.com. Registration opens Monday, April 15 on the Summit website and closes June 24, or when the capacity of 900 attendees is reached. Advance registration is required.

The event is open to media. If you are interested in registering as a press attendee, please email ERI-Summit-Media@darpa.mil.

All administrative and technical questions regarding this event should be directed to ERI-Summit@darpa.mil.

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Media with inquiries should contact DARPA Public Affairs at outreach@darpa.mil