Information Microsystems

Many defense semiconductor power amplifiers (PAs) and other high-power electronic and photonic components are thermally limited by the high thermal resistance of the region within 100 µm of the electronic junction, also known as the near junction region. The goal of the Near Junction Thermal Transport (NJTT) effort of the TMT program is to achieve a 3x or greater improvement in power handling from GaN power amplifiers through improved thermal management of the near junction region. This will benefit the warfighter by increasing the capability of RF systems such as Radar, communications and Electronic Warfare.

As electronic system technology advances – with continual increases in requirements leading to increasing demand for higher power consumption – there has been increasing pressure on the thermal engineering and heat rejection technologies used. The need for performance inevitably leads to operation of most electronic systems at the limits of the available thermal management technology.

The DoD has become increasingly reliant on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) applications. With the advent of expanded ISR capabilities, there is a pressing need to dramatically expand the real-time processing of wide-area, high-resolution video imagery, especially for target recognition and tracking a large number of objects. Not only is the volume of sensor data increasing exponentially, there is also a dramatic increase in the complexity of analysis, reflected in the number of operations per pixel per second. These expanding processing requirements for ISR missions, as well as other DoD sensor applications, are quickly outpacing the capabilities of existing and projected computing platforms.

Sophisticated electronics are increasingly pervasive on the battlefield for a range of applications that include remote sensing and communications. However, it is nearly impossible to track and recover every device, resulting in their unintended accumulation in the environment, potential recovery and use by unauthorized individuals, and compromise of intellectual property and technological advantage.

Arati Prabhakar, Ph.D., is director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Serving in this position since July 2012, she has focused the agency’s efforts on rethinking complex military systems in fundamental ways; harnessing the information explosion to address national security challenges; and planting new seeds of technological surprise in fields as diverse as mathematics, synthetic biology, and neurotechnology.