The Pentagon's boffinry nerve center DARPA has doled out $840 million to develop next-generation semiconductor microsystems for America's military.

The recipient of the cash is the Texas Institute for Electronics (TIE), an org founded in 2021, housed at the University of Texas-Austin, and operating as a consortium comprising state and local governments in the Lone Star State, chip firms, and academic institutions.

TIE’s research focuses on heterogeneous integration technology, better known as chiplets - individual silicon dies that are packaged together into complete chips. Processors from AMD and others famously use this approach: A modern AMD Ryzen or Epyc part, for instance, includes a collection of dies that each house clusters of CPU cores and IO circuitry.

Owing to TIE's experience in this area of semiconductor R&D, DARPA has selected the group to develop 3D heterogeneous integration (3DHI) tech, an approach that involves stacking layers of silicon dies on top of each other rather than side-by-side in a chip package. The funding is part of DARPA’s Next Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing (NGMM) program.

The project will take five years to complete, split evenly into two parts. The first phase involves the construction of a manufacturing center which will be used to create 3DHI microsystem prototypes for the Department of Defense (DoD). TIE's industry partners include AMD, Applied Materials, Global Foundries, Intel, Micron, and many others.

As we've alluded to, this isn't totally new and novel tech; chiplets and stacks of dies are being used in some shape or form in today's PC and server microprocessors and GPUs. Crucially, the goal of NGMM is to give the US Dept of Defense "higher performance, lower power, light weight and compact defense systems" for things like "radar, satellite imaging, [and] unmanned aerial vehicles."

Ie: Kick this consumer and business-grade technology up a gear for the military.

As such, the total budget for the project is about $1.4 billion, $840 million of which is from DARPA and $552 million from Texas itself. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/18/darpa_awards_840m_to_utaustin/