Chipweave
Responses Due By
2025-02-21 23:59:59 US/Eastern Time
Problem Statement
The Department of Defense (DoD) faces significant challenges in the design of electronic chips, which are critical components in legacy and modern military systems. Despite the increasing reliance on digital technologies, certain applications require the unique performance characteristics of analog, mixed-signal, photonic, and hybrid chips.
However, the design of these chips is often a bottleneck, with prolonged design cycles and high redesign rates. Current manual design processes are time-consuming, iterative, and error-prone. Furthermore, the rising costs of prototyping and the shortage of skilled analog designers have created bottlenecks in the development pipeline. The DoD needs a way to accelerate the design process and reduce errors.
Desired Solution
The U.S. Government is seeking a digital engineering platform to accelerate the design and validation of integrated circuits (ICs).
The primary interest is a digital engineering platform for analog integrated circuits. A secondary interest is mixed-signal, photonic, and hybrid chips and in heterogeneous integration structures like interposers. Submissions should clearly state their relevance to the desired chip type(s). Submissions that exclusively focus on digital chip design are not of interest and will be deemed irrelevant.
Solutions should offer a compelling differentiator that addresses one or more of the following objectives:
- Design Automation: automation of IC design process steps, such as sizing, layout, placement, or routing, to reduce reliance on manual processes while maintaining or improving design quality.
- Enhanced Verification: improvements to simulation or emulation, allowing for faster or more accurate verification of IC design and behavior.
- Greater Flexibility: broad spectrum-compatible and manufacturable Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAAs) capable of supporting a variety of applications.
- Radiation Hardened (Radhard) by Design: improvements to design speed or quality, or faster or cheaper verification of analog radhard ICs.
- Redesign Due to Obsolescence: tools to redesign or reverse-engineer analog circuits due to manufacturer (foundry) obsolescence, including migrating designs to advanced technology nodes.
- Cost Reduction: innovative approaches to minimize non-recurring engineering costs and optimize prototyping expenses without compromising performance or reliability.
Additional Notes
- Requests for Prototype Proposal (RPP) may not be issued to selected vendors if there are no compelling differentiators beyond what the U.S. Government already has access to or has already funded. In this scenario, the project will not proceed to an award phase.
- The government may facilitate teaming arrangements among submissions offering complementary capabilities to achieve desired effect.
- Companies without a CAGE code will be required to register in SAM.gov if selected. The Government recommends that prospective companies begin this process as early as possible as it may take some time.
Responsible AI (RAI)
All projects that expect to train and use ML or AI models will be expected to comply with DIU Responsible AI Guidelines and other DoD AI frameworks. Companies are encouraged to read the guidelines and develop a plan for implementation, which may be presented as part of the submission. Particularly relevant issues for this project include:
- Transparency and explainability of AI-generated content and recommendations
- Mitigation of potential biases in training data or model outputs
- Approaches for human oversight and ability to override AI systems
- Security and privacy protections for sensitive planning information
- Ethical considerations around AI's role in consequential military decision-making
Eligibility Requirements
Submission Requirements
Submissions should include an overview and technical details of the proposed solution. Inclusion of examples of the deployment of similar solutions in the commercial sector is highly encouraged.
Preference will be given to submissions that present a compelling solution to the problem statement and product requirements. Proposals should identify whether the submitter will employ partners or subcontractors and, if so, which companies would deliver which capabilities.
The Government requires cross functional collaboration and integration of technical outputs to ensure mission success. The Government intends to utilize this AOI in singularity, as well as a component of a more complex program, for which other AOI’s may be issued. Therefore, all solutions submitted in response to this AOI may be used to support, including technology insertion, into other prototyping efforts advertised by DIU. All AOIs will be governed by Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) HQ0845-20-S-C001 dated 23 March 2020.
Awarding Instrument
This solicitation will be awarded in accordance with the Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) process detailed within HQ0845-20-S-C001 (DIU CSO), posted to SAM.gov on 13 Jan 2020, updated 02 Oct 2023. This document can be found at: https://sam.gov/opp/e74c907a9220429d9ea995a4e9a2ede6/view
Vendors are reminded that in order to utilize an Other Transaction (OT) agreement the requirements of 10 USC 4022 must be satisfied. Specifically reference 10 USC 4022(d), which requires significant contribution from a nontraditional defense contractor, all participants to be small business concerns, or at least one third of the total cost of the prototype project is to be paid out of funds provided by sources other than the federal government.