20 septembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial, 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.
13 octobre 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
The strategy seeks to align various technology efforts as a means to better prepare the service for multidomain operations.
4 novembre 2024 | International, Aérospatial
The MOUs explore opportunities to enhance Poland’s national command and control capabilities with the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye through NATO interoperability and further collaboration amongst the organizations.
1 mars 2019 | International, Sécurité, Autre défense
By AARON BOYD The federal intelligence and human resources communities are preparing a coming out party for the first major update to the security clearance process in some 50 years. For the last year, the Suitability and Security Clearance Performance Accountability Council has been working on the Trusted Workforce 2.0 framework, the start of a wide-ranging effort to overhaul how background investigations are conducted. Representatives from the intelligence community, Defense Department, Office of Personnel Management, and Office of Management and Budget are leading PAC's efforts. Over the next two weeks, the team plans to debut the finalized framework to the White House and Congress and offered a group of reporters a first look at what's to come. This is the first time ever that the legislative and executive branches are on the same page with regard to clearance reform, according to Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, who is leading the framework effort along with OPM Deputy Director Michael Rigas. The two agencies, along with members of the Defense Department, have been working to reduce the crushing backlog of security investigations, which topped 725,000 in early 2018. That backlog has since been reduced to 551,000 as of Monday. But that number is 100 percent above what security professionals consider to be the baseline “steady state” of 220,000 to 250,000 investigations in process at any given time. Key to continuing to decrease the backlog and get the average clearance timeline down below 80 days is a major process overhaul, Evanina and Rigas said. “We realized this is a really big elephant, so we have to take some small bites,” beginning with reducing the backlog, Evanina said. From there, beginning mid-summer, they began to look at the “blue sky perspective,” as Evanina put it: the high-level view of structural, procedural changes that needed to take place. Discussions focused on removing “friction” from the process, said Matt Eanes, director of the PAC program management office, whether by removing the need to vet minor things or allowing investigators to use digital methods. Full article: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2019/02/security-clearance-process-about-get-its-biggest-overhaul-50-years/155229/