September 20, 2018 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
By: Brandon Knapp
The Defense Advanced Research Agency announced an $8 million contract modification for the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute to work on a program that develops circuits that be quickly adapted rather than wholesale reinvented.
The work is part of DARPA's Circuit Realization at Faster Timescales (CRAFT) research program. The modification brings the total value of the contract to $28 million, according to a Sept. 17 announcement from the Pentagon.
The program is designed to dramatically shorten the design cycle and the expense numbers for custom integrated circuits, which are essential in a wide variety of military equipment such as drones and tactically useful 3D imagery production. Currently, it can cost up to $100 million and take more than two years to design these circuits, according to a DARPA release. The CRAFT program aims to cut that timeline down to a matter of months.
“Reducing the time and cost for designing and procuring custom, high-efficiency integrated circuits, should drive more of those in the DoD technology community toward best commercial fabrication and design practices,” CRAFT program manager, Dr. Linton Salmon in a program information release. “A primary payoff would be a versatile development environment in which engineers and designers make decisions based on the best technical solutions for the systems they are building, instead of worrying about circuit design delays or costs.”
Work will be performed by USC in Marina Del Ray, California, with an expected completion date of December 2019. DARPA has been working on the program since 2015.
November 13, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security
Microsoft’s November Patch Tuesday addresses 90 security flaws, including actively exploited NTLM and Task Scheduler vulnerabilities.
June 7, 2019 | International, Naval
Please be advised that, in respect to the Defence and Security Accelerator competition: developing the Royal Navy's autonomous underwater capability, Dstl Commercial Services have offered a commercial clarification in respect to industry queries around the agreement of a Limitation of a Contractor's Liability to the proposed Framework Agreement: It is not possible to request a Limit of a Contractor's Liability (LoCL) under a Framework Agreement because it is impossible to calculate an appropriate LoCL amount with such a broad scope of work. Requests for a LoCL to the overarching framework agreement will be turned down, and proposals that include such requests will be deemed to be commercially non-compliant and excluded from the competition. However, in the event of placement of any Framework Agreement as a result of this Themed Competition, under the Tasking element of the aforementioned Framework Agreement (Item 2 of the proposed Framework Agreement only) on a Task by Task basis we will consider the risks associated with that Task and may consider it appropriate to agree a LoCL against that specific task only. This does not apply to Item 1 of the proposed Framework Agreement. Requests for a LoCL against Item 1 of the Framework Agreement will not be considered and proposals that include them excluded from the competition. Please be advised that this clarification explicitly applies to the Defence and Security Accelerator competition: developing the Royal Navy's autonomous underwater capability only. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/developing-the-royal-navys-autonomous-underwater-capability-commercial-clarification
February 22, 2021 | International, Aerospace
Regulators have extended their probe into Lockheed Martin’s proposed purchase of Aerojet Rocketdyne.