While the U.S. military would love customized electronic circuits on demand, the cost and time required are too high. The result is that the users settle for general-purpose circuits that consume too much power when installed on small unmanned aerial vehiclesUAVs or on heavily burdened soldiers.
“A custom integrated circuit designed only to process images from an airborne radar or to analyze sensor data for warfighters on the ground doesn’t need to run a spreadsheet or a word processor,” said Linton Salmon, a program manager in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office. “Why carry around a heavy bulging Swiss Army knife when all you need is a single Phillips-head screwdriver?”
That’s why DARPA has set up a program to simplify the creation of customized circuits. DARPA is inviting proposals for Circuit Realization at Faster Timescales (CRAFT).
CRAFT will take advantage of the “unprecedented ability to fabricate customized, technology-specific circuits using the 16 nanometer/14 nanometer commercial fabrication infrastructure that today produces generic commodity circuits,” according to a DARPA news release.
CRAFT aims to slash the design cycle for custom integrated circuits by a factor of 10, so that circuits can be created in months rather than years. DARPA also wants design frameworks ready when next-generation fabrication plants are operational, as well as a repository so that designs don’t have to be reinvented each time.
The three-year CRAFT program is budgeted for $30 million.
