DARPA Calls for Post-Moore Ideas

　　It’s “the summer of listening” for Bill Chappell, head of a $200+ million government program seeking ways to revitalize electronics. He doesn’t expect to find a replacement for Moore’s law, but he does hope to “shake things up,” creating a handful of alternatives for advancing semiconductor performance.

　　“I don’t think exponential growth on a single variable [such as CMOS scaling] is achievable,” Chappell said in an interview about the Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI).

　　“The next era we're heading into is about progress in lots of variables…hardware/software co-design, new materials and functional blocks, specialization for each app…We’re not out of ideas at all, this is a wildly interesting time where lots of creativity will make up for the march of scaling,” said Chappell, director of the microsystems group at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

　　Many industry executives heard about ERI for the first time at a June meeting Chappell hosted in Austin during the Design Automation Conference. About 60 people attended the meeting from companies including Analog Devices, ARM, Cadence, IBM, Intel, Qualcomm, Synopsys, TSMC and Xilinx.

　　“It was an intro to the program for industry leaders who may not have been involved with DARPA,” said Steve Keckler, a vice president of architecture research at Nvidia, who spoke at the event about the GPU designer’s work with the agency.

　　“I see ERI as an opportunity to engage a broader set of partners to bring things to market, many who haven’t collaborated with DARPA before,” Keckler said.

　　This week DARPA conducted a two-day meeting in San Jose to work with chip experts and help them form partnerships. As many as 300 people attended, representing about 45 companies, 10 defense contractors and numerous universities.

　　“This is the start of something with teeth behind it,” Chappell said during a break in the event.

　　Earlier, DARPA hosted a meeting with defense contractors in Washington D.C. to spawn their ideas. A team of ERI program managers will package the best concepts into a formal call for proposals in September. DARPA will pick and negotiate contracts on winning projects over the following seven months before funding is released and the hard work begins.