DARPA announces first round of $1.5 billion grants to revitalize electronics industry

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced on July 24 at its Electronics Resurgence Initiative Summit the first recipients of what will be a total of $1.5 billion in grants for basic research on electronics and computing over the next five years. The agency aims to realize high-risk ideas to push computing beyond incremental performance gains. Several of these projects focus on chemistry and materials science. The largest grant, $61 million over the next three years, aims to enable MIT, Stanford University, and SkyWater Technology Foundry researchers to commercialize chips made by layering carbon nanotube processing circuits with new memory devices based on metal oxides. Such chips could lead to 100-fold gains in speed and energy efficiency. Other projects aim to test and commercialize new memory devices. For example, a $6.7 million grant will help Applied Materials and Arm evaluate a lineup of metal oxides and manufacturing recipes for energy-efficient, neuronlike correlated electron RAM devices based on doped metal oxides. “We need to use chemistry to find new ways to build things,” Intel Chief Technology Officer Mike Mayberry says. Intel is also receiving initiative funding.