Twenty U.S. Department of Defense military projects that are expected to change people's lives (Part 4)

9. The project can ensure that the imported chips are not counterfeit and defective

　　Most of the raw material production in the United States is outsourced to overseas production, and the US Department of Defense has doubts about the reliability of systems developed using imported integrated circuits.

　　Since the U.S. Department of Defense cannot precisely monitor the production of each chip, DARPA is developing the Integrity and Reliability of Integrated Circuits project to obtain functional information of circuits through technology without destroying individual circuits.

　　This means DARPA will be able to look at a circuit and make sure it's working exactly as specified.

　　The technology could also be used in the civilian sector to ensure that users' computer hardware does not have a keylogger or is not a fake. In addition, if the technology can be used commercially, it could also be used in the field of computer repair.

　　10. Methods to easily detect biological and chemical weapons attacks

　　Current technology required to detect chemical and biological weapons is large, cumbersome and expensive.

　　DARPA's Compact Mid-ultraviolet technology program is making the detection of such weapons more compact and mobile. The project aims to develop a device that uses ultraviolet light, and any progress in the project will be used in the fields of drinking water purification and biological and chemical weapon tracking.

11. The project aims to make computing more energy efficient

　　Computing speed is measured in floating-point operations per second, which is the number of simple calculations that the system can perform per second. Nowadays, such calculations are usually performed in the range of billions of floating-point operations per second. The energy consumption of floating-point operations per second is also very important and is a measure of the effective use of energy. So how can performance be linked to improving energy consumption?

　　DARPA wants to expand the current standard of 1 gigaflop per watt to 75 gigaflops per watt. The Power Efficiency Revolution For Embedded Computing Technologies project is expected to completely change the consumption of energy.

　　If the project succeeds, the 7,500 percent energy savings could allow smartphones to run for weeks on end, while laptops would need to be recharged about as often as a Prius needs to be refueled.

　　12. Cutting-edge nano-processing projects

　　DARPA has invested heavily in nanotechnology, and its core concepts have been proven. The technology is feasible, but the difficulty still lies in mass production.

　　In the Tip-Based Nanofabrication program, DARPA is trying to make the controlled production of nanoscale materials a reality. It has been demonstrated that nanotube "forests" can grow, and controlling and managing this growth is the goal of this program.

　　If the project succeeds, a whole new technological field will open up. The controlled production of nanotubes, nanowires and quantum dots will allow the creation of nanomachines from raw materials that are currently unavailable. The fields of medicine and consumer technology are eagerly awaiting the results of this research.

 13. High-efficiency, high-energy lasers to protect drones

　　As you know, DARPA is very interested in laser technology. DARPA plans to combine lasers operating at different wavelengths into a single beam in order to increase the intensity of the beam. DARPA wants to develop an efficient laser that can maintain a single intensity beam.

　　The goal of the Architecture for Diode High Energy Laser System project is to create a new high-intensity laser that can be immediately used on unmanned aircraft to defend against attacks.

　　For civilian use, lasers have been widely used in the industrial field. A better laser product can have greater commercial prospects.

　　14. Three-dimensional integrated circuits

　　Integrated circuits are generally two-dimensional objects, but DARPA wants to break through this limitation and try to develop three-dimensional integrated circuits.

　　If successful, the DARPA project would mean that computers could become even faster because an important limitation has been overcome. One factor holding back further growth in two-dimensional integrated circuits is that their complexity keeps expanding, leaving no room to run all the necessary connections on a two-dimensional circuit board.

　　The three-dimensional conceptual circuit, while difficult to implement, would allow DARPA to scale up integrated circuit technology and make it more compact.