Update June 2020: the Darpa Wideband Adaptive RF Protection (WARP) program will soon kick off, and will hopefully bring about some new tunable filter technologies. Hey, let's start a page on that topic and see what shows up. Read more about WARP proposers' day here. Below we cribbed WARP's three main topics for you. It's about time we saw some decent investment in tunable filters, bravo!
- Wideband tunable filtering with both center frequency and bandwidth tuning to provide full-band coverage;
- Wideband analog signal cancellation with sufficient analog cancellation to enable wideband same-frequency STAR over a large delay spread leakage channel
- Embedded interference sensing and control of the electromagnetic environment or leakage path for autonomous closed-loop adaptation of the filtering and signal cancellation.
As far as we know there have been no awards on WARP yet, but you can place your money on the usual suspects. Darpa MTO program winners are fewer in number than square-root of the cast of the Jersey Shore, with Raytheon (The Situation?) and Northrop Grumman. (Snooki?) competing for attention.
Diversity at Darpa?
Speaking of the "The Situation", here we are in 2020... when are we going see an African-American Darpa Program Manager? If you Google "Darpa" and "diverse", you will come across the DAHI program, and also this paragraph here:
"DARPA explicitly reaches for transformational change instead of incremental advances. But it does not perform its engineering alchemy in isolation. It works within an innovation ecosystem that includes academic, corporate and governmental partners, with a constant focus on the Nation’s military Services, which work with DARPA to create new strategic opportunities and novel tactical options. For decades, this vibrant, interlocking ecosystem of diverse collaborators has proven to be a nurturing environment for the intense creativity that DARPA is designed to cultivate."
Question: how diverse is Darpa, really? Here's an experiment ... you can display all of the Darpa program managers on this page:
https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/people?ppl=viewall
Some of the bios have photos, some don't. Looking at the photos, white people make up most of the lineup, followed by Asian Americans. It almost goes without saying that if there was a Black PM, he/she would have a bio picture posted.
By watching for pronouns "he", "she", "his" and "her" you can count up the number of female PMs, and you will get to 21. That's 21, out of several hundred. The branch of Darpa that microwave engineers are most familiar with is MTO, here there is just one female PM and one assistant PM.
The answer is, Darpa should talk to the Office of Personnel Management about diversity.
Darpa RN DMC Program
There's a new program coming up, called RN DMC (Resilient Networked Distributed Mosaic Communications). Recall the group Run DMC from the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-DMC
RN DMC seems like a strange choice for a Darpa Program, perhaps someone can enlighten us on how this came to be.
Voices of Darpa podcast
Voices of Darpa are audio-only presentations that you can access on Youtube, Blubrry, and iTunes. Here is the "Semiconductor Whisperer", Dr. Dan Green, talking about.... you guessed semiconductors, right?
Episode 3, The Semiconductor Whisperer, with Dr. Dan Green,
Here's a separate Microwaves101 page on the MIMIC program (1987-1995).
Note: although it is our intention to keep this page up to date, it is next to impossible as Darpa's website is a moving target. So expect a few broken links below!
Here is a link to Darpa's archived programs. It is far from complete but you can search by program office or topic.
Why do we keep writing "Darpa" instead of "DARPA"? The latter is more correct, but it seems like shouting. You would not spell "radar" as "RADAR", right?
Go to our download area and get a copy of DARPA's 2015 strategic plan. Here's two figures from the plan that illustrate DARPA's role in technology, if you've been to a DARPA presentation you've see these charts no doubt!
Here's Darpa's Strategic Plan, circa 2019. If there is a new version, let us know!
On this page we will describe some of the DARPA programs past and present that are used to advance the state of the art in microwave engineering, here in the United States. DARPA only takes on far-out jobs that are high-risk/high payoff, which has led to the expression "DARPA hard", meaning a problem that is gonna take your best guys some time (and beaucoups dinero) to figure out. Increasingly their mission has changed to taking cool technology into the field, rather than pure research.
Note: most of the information on this site was gathered from the darpa.mil web site. You can rest assured that nothing on Microwaves101.com is in violation of the International Traffic In Arms Regulations (ITAR) .
DARPA's 2017 budget was $3.3B, and it has remained relatively flat over the years. The President's FY2018 budget request for DARPA is $3.17B. The FY2017 budget request was $2.97B. We'll wager a guess and say that somewhere in the neighborhood of $100M of DARPA's Wallet o' Warbucks goes to develop microwave hardware each year. You are welcome to sift through hundreds of pages of funding here to form your own analysis.
Who's your Daddy?
History of DARPA
DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It one point the removed the word "defense" from their name and DARPA became ARPA, but that sounded like a noise that a sick manatee might make so they went back to the original moniker.
DARPA was formed in 1958, shortly after Sputnik was launched, so the US would not be caught by any other surprises. It's original focus was to get the US on track in the Space Race, but over time it has evolved into much more.
DARPA programs have made some of the major advancements in technology that the modern world depends on. For example, the internet was once the ARPANET. Some of the technologies that were transitioned from DARPA to useful military and commercial products are described on the DARPA site's About Us page. This includes the SR-71 blackbird, early phase array antennas, the M-16 rifle, satellite navigation systems (which led to the global positioning system (GPS), the Saturn V launch vehicle that put Apollo astronauts on their way to to the Moon, and stealth fighter bomber and navy vessels (Sea Shadow). By the way, read here the real quote about Al Gore "inventing" the internet.
In terms of microwave engineering, DARPA was responsible for the huge cash injection that made MMICs into a profitable industry in the United States (for at least a short time). The "MIMIC" program dumped wheelbarrows of cash into GaAs foundries across the country from 1988 to 1999, each one working on different microwave chipsets that would support defense-related hardware such as T/R modules and EW receivers. Many older microwave program managers get misty eyed when they think back to these exciting times, but these dudes gotta stop living in the past... comments that start with "I remember on the MIMIC program" have no real relevance today, that was two wars ago. Later programs such MAFET (Microwave and Analog Front-End Technology) achieved further cost reductions in MMICs.
DARPA issues a variety of "challenge" events, such as the Cyber Grand Challenge (a competition to create automatic defensive systems capable of identifying and fixing software flaws in real time), the Service Academies Swarm Challenge (encouraging military students to develop innovative offensive and defensive tactics for swarms of small UAVs) and the Robotics Challenge. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, offered a prize of US$2,000,000 to the team that develops a radio design that most reliably achieves successful communication in the presence of other competing radios. Congratulations, Team GatorWings from the University of Florida!
Ongoing and future DARPA programs
DARPA was reorganized in 2006 into six main offices. For microwave engineering work, the MTO office is the one to watch. Here's an old org chart of DARPA, which was approved for public release. As of March, 2021, the acting director at DARPA is Dr. Stephanie Tompkins. but one of the other names in the boxes are correct any more...
Microsystems Technology Office
Most DARPA programs that have to do with microwaves come from the MTO (Microsystems Technology Office) program office. In their own words:
"Exploit breakthroughs in materials, devices, circuits, and mathematics to develop beyond leading edge components with revolutionary performance and functionality to enable new platform capability for the Department of Defense."
For some reason this office used to love MEMS technology, but we're not convinced.
Past programs include 3-D Micro Electromagnetic Radio Frequency Systems (3D MERFS). This is a cool program that seeks to make rectangular coax cheaply, using printed wiring board technology. The contractors were Rohm and Haas (now Nuvotronics), and BAE. Who's your Papa? Check out our page on rectax to lean more about this topic! A second contract on teh same subject was called Disruptive Manufacturing Technology (DMT).
WBGS2 Wide Band Gap Semiconductor was a cash injection for those US foundries that were pursuing gallium nitride (GaN) and/or silicon carbide devices.
IRFFE means Intelligent RF Front Ends. This program sought to build devices that can operate across wide frequency bands, by self-tuning to the desired frequency. Low loss switches are used to move matching circuits to optimize at different bands. This is NOT a trivial problem, but no DARPA project starts out trivial!
SMART Scalable Millimeter-Wave Architectures for Reconfigurable Transceivers wanted to develop 3-dimensional MMIC technology so that power amps can fit into the lattice spacing of a phased array antenna. Northrop Grumman and Rockwell each owned part of this program.
RF MEMS Improvements (RF MEMS). DARPA was one of the early sponsors of MEMS work.
The COSMOS program was an attempt to marry several semiconductor technologies onto the same substrate, like silicon CMOS and InP HEMT. A follow on program, DAHI, is still going on, here contractors had to step up the game and add yet another technologu to the mix.
The NEXT program brought sub-100um gates to GaN technology, moving its maximum frequency well beyond 110 GHz and spawning collateral developments such as respectable GaN low noise devices.
Though MEMS should be well beyond the DARPA stage of life, MEMS work went on and on. Contractor Radant claimed to have solved the Riddle of MEMS, but stopped showing up at the IMS show a few years back. Hmmm....
DARPA's RF-FPGA program worked to make reconfigurable hardware a reality, with low-loss switches used to change networks on the fly. One outcome of this program was the emergence of RF chalcogenide switches to replace MEMS.
HiFIVE sought to talke vacuum electronics into millimeterwave frequencies (220 GHz), in imniature form.
Current programs include ART, or adaptive RF technologies, which seeks to produce adaptable RF front-ends that can be applied to 30 MHz to 30 GHz.
VISAR is developing a radar at 220 GHz to see through clouds.
Arrays at commercial timescales (ACT) aims to make phased arrays less expensive to develop.
ICECool is working to unlock the thermally-limited potential for GaN amplifiers using exotic heatsink technologies.
CONverged Collaborative Elements for RF Task Operations or CONCERTO, focuses on supporting communications, radar, and EW systems with a flexible RF architecture that uses shared common hardware.
Darpa MADFIRES (Multi Azimuth Defense Fast Intercept Round Engagement System) is working on adding RF sensors to hypervelocity, high-G-launch weapons. The idea is to replace missiles with guns.
The CHIPS program (Common Heterogeneous Integration and IP Reuse Strategies) hopes to make re-use of intellectual property as building blocks. This is a new program for 2017.
MIDAS is making working towards digital beamforming, multi-beam phased arrays at millimeterwave. As of 2018 it is just getting started.
Strategic Technology Office (STO)
STO was formed by merging the Advanced Technology Office (ATO) and the Special Projects Office (SPO). This happened over the summer of 2006. This is another organization worth watching for microwave-related work.
Their stated goal is to focus on "technologies that enable fighting as a network to increase military effectiveness, cost leverage, and adaptability." This program office may be involved in microwave technology, but at the system level. We like to think that ATO will help prevent Nena's worst nightmare, the 99 Red Balloon Scenario:
99 Duesenjaeger, Jeder war ein grosser Krieger
Hielten sich fuer Captain Kirk, sas gab ein grosses Feuerwerk!
Here is the direct translation of the song from German!
Low cost cruise missile defense (LCCMD) developed a Ka-band AESA (an active phased array). This program originated in the SPO and then moved to STO.
Integrated Sensor is Structure (ISIS) was a blimp that was going to have a phased array, built-in. It never got off the ground. An unfortunate choice of acronym...
Defense Science Office
While intestinal fortitude may no longer be an active program, DARPA does conduct research into Bio-electrical interfaces.