Manufacturing

Military platforms—such as ships, aircraft and ground vehicles—rely on advanced materials to make them lighter, stronger and more resistant to stress, heat and other harsh environmental conditions. Currently, the process for developing new materials to field in platforms frequently takes more than a decade. This lengthy process often means that developers of new military platforms are forced to rely on decades-old, mature materials because potentially more advanced materials are still being developed and tested, and are considered too large a risk to be implemented into platform designs.

Many defense electronics are susceptible to radiation and high temperatures. Developing electronics that can withstand harsh conditions would expand the types of environments in which DoD electronics may be used.

Uncertainties in materials and component manufacturing processes are a primary cause of cost escalation and delay during the development, testing and early production of defense systems. In addition, fielded military platforms may have unanticipated performance problems, despite large investment and extensive testing of their key components and subassemblies. These uncertainties and performance problems are often the result of the random variations and non-uniform scaling of manufacturing processes. These challenges, in turn, lead to counterproductive resistance to adoption of new, innovative manufacturing technologies that could offer better results.

Advances in integrated circuit technologies have enabled single-chip integration of multiple analog/RF and digital functions, resulting in complex mixed-signal systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) well suited for meeting the stringent and unique requirements of DoD electronic microsystems. High performance SoC designs have been made feasible by the increased speed and higher density available in modern nanometer-scale integrated circuit processes. However, a major consequence of the drive toward ever smaller transistor gate lengths is an exponential increase in intrawafer and intradie process variations that degrade on circuit performance. Consequently, designers must over-constrain performance order to guarantee sufficient postfabrication performance yield.

For decades, miniaturizing electronics has been key to a wide array of technology innovations and an important economic driver. As an example, the seemingly endless shrinking of the transistor has allowed the semiconductor industry to place ever more devices on the same amount of silicon. Each time the size decreased, transistors became faster and used less power, allowing increasingly capable electronics in smaller packages at reduced cost.