White House and U.S. Department of Defense officials joined industry and university partners at Arizona State University to spotlight five new investments announced this week to help strengthen the nation’s chip-making capabilities and reduce dependency on foreign sources of microelectronics.
The five new projects were awarded millions under the CHIPS and Science Act-funded Microelectronics Commons initiative. Officials, on the first stop in a national tour, discussed more details and the significance of the projects awarded to hubs located in Arizona and California.
“Arizona State University has been an advocate for a collaborative approach to making America competitive globally in this vitally important industry and we strongly believe that universities have a critical role to play in our nation’s success,” said ASU President Michael Crow. “The SWAP Hub has developed an unmatched network of partner capabilities that reflect the objectives and intentions of the Microelectronics Commons, and these project awards enable us to translate the Hub’s capabilities into impact by solving pressing national security technology challenges.”
Headquartered in Arizona, the SWAP Hub is part of the Microelectronics Commons, a network of regional technology hubs. It connects the Southwest – the fastest-growing and largest semiconductor cluster in the United States with more than $100 billion in private investment – to a growing network of defense and electronics partners across the country.
Five SWAP Hub projects were awarded $29.6M million to advance innovations that will support the Microelectronics Commons program and the White House’s Invest in America efforts, aimed at strengthening the nation’s chip-making capabilities.
Here is a closer look at the five winning projects:
Project: Integrated RF GaN Technology to Support NextG, 5G & 6G Wireless Systems
Project Team: NXP, Raytheon, National Instruments, Arizona State University (ASU).
This project leverages disruptive innovations in radio equipment to offer dynamic adjustments through small form-factor Gallium nitride (GaN) power amplifier technology. As data consumption skyrockets, telecommunications systems must operate at higher frequencies and wider bandwidths while meeting stringent size, weight and power requirements. The project aims to integrate advanced reconfigurable radio architectures with GaN technology to create a unified, self-testing system
Project: SMART – Scalable Modular Architecture for RF Transceivers
Project Team: Alphacore, ASU, Rice, Lockheed Martin, Auburn
The project aims to advance radio frequency (RF) transceiver technology to improve national defense and commercial capabilities. Integrating communications and sensing in a single system-on-a-chip increases resource efficiency, optimizes spectrum utilization, reduces latency and improves reliability while reducing the size and cost of transceivers. The goal of the project is to create a transceiver integrated on a single microelectronics chip, capable of both communications and sensing functions with novel capabilities for devices using 5G and 6G mobile networks and beyond
Project Name: Spaceborne Low-Energy AI Computing (SLEAC)
Project Team: ASU, Sandia, Raytheon, USC, UC Boulder, LTC Design, AFRL, Global Foundries.
Advancing the performance of satellites through AI could yield a major advantage for national defense. The project aims to extend the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to satellites orbiting the planet by directly integrating a highly efficient, radiation hard AI chip with focal plane array image sensors used in space. This would be several times more efficient than modern unhardened systems and over 100 times more efficient than the current state of the art radiation hard systems and will enable satellites to track objects that are too faint or too fast to be detected by current systems.
Project: Multi-MHz, High Density, Ultra-fast RADAR Power Converter
Project Team: ASU, Sandia, Infineon, Lockheed Martin, Thermavant
This project will advance radar power systems in critical defense applications. The project will specifically develop a multi-megahertz, multi-kilowatt, high-density ultra-fast radar power converter that forms the heart of advanced radar systems. The converters will use GaN-based switching devices and lead to dramatic performance improvements including six times higher power density, 50% lower losses and ultra-fast response times.
Project Name: ARC-V Secure Processor
Project Team: Idaho Scientific, Synopsys, Global Foundries, Mercury Computer, BAE Systems
The project’s primary objective is to create a secure, low-power processor that allows the military to confidently deploy advanced systems, even in contested environments, that rely on powerful but vulnerable commercial electronics. The secondary objective is to develop a customer reference design and software development kit that allows both commercial and military users to evaluate the performance and security features of the ARC-V Secure Processor.
The SWAP Hub has more than 170 members – 75 large companies, 28 academic institutions, and more than 60 small businesses. It has launched the first Fanout Wafer Level Packaging R&D Center in North America and has partnered with the Arizona Commerce Authority and NXP to develop a High Power & High Frequency Device Ecosystem.
In addition, it has advanced workforce development with more than 1,000 individual students enrolled in Microelectronics Commons-funded programs with four new degree programs and 26 new curriculum units at ASU alone, as well as 12 new courses.
During their visit, officials also announced that the California Defense Ready Electronics and Microdevices Superhub (CA DREAMS) and California Pacific-Northwest AI Hardware Hub, led by the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC ISI) and Stanford University, respectively, received funding for projects under the Microelectronics Commons initiatives.
The nationwide tour to announce Microelectronics Commons projects continues this week with trips to Massachusetts and North Carolina.
