Mike Levin: “the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] has a continuing program of research and development for advanced…”

“the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] has a continuing program of research and development for advanced electronics and materials. One of the most promising elements of this program is called seamless high off-chip connectivity, or SHOCC for short. The SHOCC program offers the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of producing integrated circuits while increasing their performance considerably. This would be important to our information-age military forces, as well as to our commercial electronics industry. One of the problems faced by the electronics industry, for both military and civilian applications, is the increased cost of producing high performance integrated circuits. While we have made many dramatic improvements in the chips we produce, there is a point at which increasing their performance to the next logical level is cost-prohibitive. We are approaching that point quickly. Additionally, the wiring that connects the circuits together on the circuit boards is incapable of transferring all the massive amounts of data that the chips can handle. Consequently, there is an electron traffic jam and bottleneck when the data leaves a chip and goes on to its next destination. It is like an eight-lane information highway suddenly becoming a one-lane dirt road; you can be sure there will be real show-downs. So we need to increase the density of the off-chip wiring.”