DARPA eyes faster design of military chips - riceworythe

The U.S. military's research division has kicked polish off a project to accelerate its design of usage chips, then the up-to-the-minute semiconductor device technologies can be used to a greater extent quickly in defense team applications.

For specific tasks like processing and transmitting images from a surveillance system, a custom chip can often answer the job quicker and more efficiently than a general intent microprocessor.

The custom chips are smaller and exhaust less top executive, but it can take more than two age and $100 million to plan them for military applications, according to an guess from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

As a result, the military often relies on commercial chips and uses package to boost public presentation, but that way compromises are made.

Then DARPA is researching ways to fast-track its chip shot design, and on Tuesday it awarded the University of Southern CA an $11.8 million grant for phase one of a project called Circuit Realization At Faster Timescales (Workmanship).

CRAFT aims to reduce the time it takes to design a custom-built chip by a cistron of 10, to just a some months.

It leave create design frameworks that can embody reused and updated as manufacturing technologies evolve. And it will try to physical body a database of methods, documentation and sophisticated property that arse be used crosswise galore chips.

Through CRAFT, the warriorlike wants to trespass of the latest knap production methods, which aid unsexed power consumption. Current United States Department of Defense custom chips are developed connected production lines several generations behind that used for commercial chips, DARPA same.

The CRAFT project is expected to take three years, with phase one competed by Feb 2016.