DARPA seeks affordable, low-power designer ICs
NewsAugust 21, 2015
ARLINGTON, Virginia. Officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are seeking proposals for the three-phase Circuit Realization At Faster Timescales (CRAFT) program which aims at spurring development of integrated circuits (ICs) that are not only low power, but can be fabricated much more affordably than custom ICs used today that often exceed $100 million in development costs. They want to develop new fast-track circuit-design methods, multiple sources for integrated circuit fabrication, and a technology repository.
“This dilemma has reduced the use of custom-integrated circuits and, consequently, the performance of DoD systems,” according to a just-published Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) announcing the CRAFT solicitation. (DARPA-BAA-15-55, published on August 17, 2015, is available on FedBizOpps: http://ow.ly/QZPzX.) The program is slated to last just over three years with total funding of about $30 million.
Such ICs are necessary for military systems that control unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); real-time conversion of raw radar data into tactically useful 3-D imagery; and instant access to high-resolution sensor feeds on the battlefield. Too often the ICs developed are either too expensive or generate too much power to be practical on small, space-constrained platforms, say DARPA officials.
The Department of Defense would like to get away from the practice of using more generic, inexpensive, and readily available general-purpose ICs and relying on software to make those circuits run the required specialized operations, according to the DARPA release. Using these general-purpose circuits can speed up design and implementation, but it also burdens electronic systems with unnecessary power-gobbling circuitry.
Many systems could benefit from CRAFT advances such as the data- and computation-intensive “Gotcha” radar system that the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is developing to identify moving objects over city-scale areas and render detailed 3-D imagery. “Gotcha currently requires a land-based supercomputer to make sense of the radar data and convert it into tactically useful imagery. However, relaying the data to a remote supercomputer across a contested data link can cause crippling delays,” explains Linton Salmon, a program manager in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). “The CRAFT program could help put more of the necessary computational power on the UAV itself or on the backs of warfighters, enabling quicker delivery of the imagery to those who need it most.”
At the core of the CRAFT concept is an unprecedented ability to fabricate customized, technology-specific circuits using the 16 nanometer/14 nm commercial fabrication infrastructure that today produces generic commodity circuits. “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 spread sheet or a word processor,” Salmon says. “Why carry around a heavy bulging Swiss Army knife when all you need is a single Phillips-head screwdriver?”
Being able to jettison the massive amounts of circuitry dedicated to everyday functions would enable the resulting spare capability to be devoted to crucial functions, Salmon adds. “In the end,” he said, “you would have a top-of-the-line, custom-integrated circuit that does only the job you need and does so much more effectively.”
To achieve its goals, CRAFT looks to shorten the design cycle for custom ICs by a factor of 10 (on the order of months rather than years); devise design frameworks that can be readily recast when next-generation fabrication plants come on line; and create a repository so that methods, documentation and intellectual property need not be reinvented with each design and fabrication cycle.
“If CRAFT is successful, design of custom integrated circuits will be far more readily available to those building DoD systems,” Salmon says. “As a result, engineers will be able to make decisions based on the best technical solutions for the systems they are building, instead of worrying about circuit design delays or costs.”
Caption: DARPA’s new Circuit Realization At Faster Timescales (CRAFT) program aims to make it easier, faster and cheaper to design custom circuits akin to this one, which was specially designed to provide a range of voltages and currents for testing an infrared sensor device that had been a candidate for an orbiting telescope.
