As soon as they were approached about funding the in-the-works chip and IBM’s underpinning NorthPole project in 2021, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies Maynard Holliday and his team immediately “recognized the utility and potential — I don’t want to say revolutionary, but game-changing, leap-ahead capability that this represented,” he said in an interview on Wednesday.

Dharmendra Modha, IBM Research’s NorthPole lead, has been working on what would evolve into NorthPole since around 2004. On Thursday, he published results of his team’s research in Science, arguing that this new AI-enabling semiconductor prototype has proven to outperform all the latest prevalent chip architectures on the market, including the most advanced. 

A major element of its promise is that all the memory for the device is stored directly on the chip — as opposed to elsewhere, like the cloud or company-owned servers.

“I would say NorthPole is the faint reflection of the brain in the middle of a silicon wafer that points to a new direction in computer architecture … What that means, the world and we will together figure it out over the years to come,” Modha noted.

In separate interviews on Wednesday, IBM’s Modha and DOD’s Holliday briefed DefenseScoop on the making and uniqueness of this new prototype, and where the U.S. military and defense researchers might take it from here.

“What this enables is that compute to be able to be done at the point of interaction. And so you can think about how that’s really valuable for the soldier and/or the platform when you’re in a GPS-[strained] or contested electromagnetic environment and the compute is being able to be done locally,” Holliday said.

‘Just scratching the surface’

According to Modha, the phrase “‘the architecture of the brain’” refers to how the organ stores, moves and schedules information. And “‘technology of Mother Nature,’” he explained, encompasses how the chemicals and the organic substrate of the brain implement that architecture. 

“What we have taken is the architecture of the brain — the blueprint of how it computes, how it stores, how it connects, how it schedules, how it communicates and how it interacts with the world — those principles, we have extracted and implemented in an off-the-shelf silicon technology process. So it does not have any of the organic technologies of the brain, such as the chemical signaling, or anything like that. It’s taking the architecture and implementing it in today’s technology — that’s the essence of the innovation,” Modha told DefenseScoop.

One of the government’s top engineering and robotics experts and technology innovation leaders, Holliday has helped push forward a range of crucial national security-aligned capabilities. 

“This always blows my mind when I think of it. So, our brains have 10 to the 14th or 100 trillion synapses, and we have [billions of] neurons. Humans have created civilization, and our brain consumes the power of a light bulb, right? And it occupies the volume of a large soda bottle. So, you know, it’s amazing,” he said. 

Modha “is right about this being a slight reflection of the brain,” Holliday added, in that the architectures are in many ways similar. However, the NorthPole prototype chip currently has 22 billion transistors — compared to the billions or trillions of synapses in human brains.

“We’re just scratching the surface with respect to architecture. But nature is, a lot of times, the best guide for … what works, because we’re still alive and thriving with our brain architecture. And so, to the extent that we can mimic that in machinery, it’s showing that it’s as powerful or more powerful than this von Neumann architecture — which is memory and central processing [unit]-separate. And you have this classic, what we call ‘von Neumann’ bottleneck — is a testament to how efficient a neuromorphic architecture is,” Holliday told DefenseScoop.

Today’s computer architecture is still largely dominated by what’s known as the von Neumann architecture, Modha explained. That term has roots that trace back to around 1945 from a description by John von Neumann, a leading defense scientist and mathematician who notably worked on the Manhattan Project to build the world’s first atomic bombs. In such architectures, memory and CPUs that process information are separated. The von Neumann bottleneck refers to the phenomenon where the time and power it takes to shuffle data between memory, processing, and any other devices within a chip can limit or affect how the corresponding system performs.

The NorthPole prototype is designed to set a completely different path from the von Neumann architecture by combining features in one place. And that also enables the nascent chip to carry out AI inferencing — or the process of running through a deep learning network’s data in real time on an application — considerably faster than others that are out there currently. 

“If you look at any computer chip, broadly, it has five dimensions: computation, memory, communication, control and input-output. Along all these five dimensions, NorthPole breaks with the past,” Modha said.

NorthPole was fabricated with a 12-nm node process. According to Modha’s new research published in Science, his team tested the prototype using the ResNet-50 model, the well-known convolutional neural net for image recognition that benchmarks the performance of AI chips. 

The researchers found that NorthPole can recognize images faster and is 25 times more energy efficient when it comes to the number of frames interpreted per joule of power required, than common 12-nm GPUs and 14-nm CPUs like those now widely used and made by Nvidia and other major players.

It also out-performed competitors in space and time efficiency. 

Pointing to those results and why they matter for the defense enterprise, Holliday spotlighted NorthPole’s power to ingest multiple sensor modalities including audio, electro-optical, infrared and sonar signals; wide-area motion imagery; synthetic aperture radar, and Lidar. 

Autonomous vehicles can use Lidar to characterize everything in their ambient environments, he noted, and electro-optical and infrared sensors can essentially use heat signatures to classify helicopters and other platforms.

“You can think about acoustic sensors that could be on a dismounted soldier or on a platform, being able to discern audio feedback from targets or just to discern, you know, signatures of weapons fires. So then you can say, ‘Alright, well, that’s, you know, this kind of weapon or that kind of weapon being fired’ … because you know what the audio signature is,” Holliday said.

“The important thing to note is it’s low, what we call ‘SWAP— size, weight and power,” he added regarding the AI chip prototype.

His hope is that such systems could potentially last longer, have longer endurance, and be more densely configured to provide more compute power.

“You can think about it on the dismounted soldier, on the [unmanned aerial vehicle], or on the [unmanned underwater vehicle]. So, all of these platforms where we want to exploit man-machine teaming, where we want to do swarming. To be able to, again, have compute at the tactical edge — that makes all of these systems smarter and more capable,” Holliday told DefenseScoop.

Next moves

Modha has been working to generate the prototype that NorthPole has become since the early 2000s for IBM, with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Air Force and others along the way.

When Holliday returned to the Pentagon in 2021 to serve in his latest post, he and his team were approached about funding IBM’s NorthPole pursuit. “Unfortunately, it had been canceled by the previous administration,” he told DefenseScoop.

“They came to me to say, ‘We are close. This is a capability we absolutely need — because it provides AI compute at the edge,’” Holliday recalled. The Office of the Secretary of Defense then opted to fund them to finish the job so that the chips could be fabricated in low numbers in the U.S. and be tested and evaluated by the government and the industrial base.

Now, that’s happening across federal, defense and other research organizations.

Each prototype AI chip has to be placed on a field programmable array to then be integrated to work within more complex systems. 

Looking to ultimately operationalize the prototype, Holliday confirmed that IBM hosted a transition workshop this summer to teach government lab insiders and other partners how to program those arrays so that they can puzzle out and run new use cases on the chips.

“IBM has proved that this is a leap-ahead capability. And we need to bridge one of these ‘valleys of death,’ which is getting it out of the prototype stage, and doing test and evaluation, and after that point, giving feedback to IBM and having them iterate one or two more times. And then, this goes into volume production for platforms that support both commercial, as well as for DOD applications,” Holliday said of the vision.

NorthPole has been funded most recently via OSD’s microelectronics program. For the next iteration, he’s encouraging IBM to go after investments via the CHIPS and Science Act.

“They’ve been in the lab for almost two decades and it’s ready to be ‘fab’ now — and so that’s one of the things that the CHIPS Act was designed to address is to get capabilities like this to commercial scale. So they fab it in low quantities at GlobalFoundries in New York, but to get to commercial scale they need to get it to a commercial-scale [fabrication facility]. There are some in the U.S. but not at the state-of-the-art technology nodes. And so TSMC and Intel have announced, and actually broken ground on three different fabs … but it’s going be years before they’re online,” Holliday explained.

Modha confirmed that — beyond the exploration of next steps, even smaller architectures, and new directions for this research — his team has already “started the process of redesigning the circuit board, so as to be less vulnerable to some of the supply chain constraints.”

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Quantum information science (QIS) is part of a complex and emerging computing paradigm where experts apply “bizarre” phenomena occurring at atomic and subatomic levels to process information in new ways. Governments are increasingly investing in associated research and development, with expectations that quantum processes will drive transformational science, engineering and communication applications in the not-so-distant future. The technology could have major implications for national security, experts say.

While classical computers operate using basic units called bits, which each hold one of two possible values — or the binary digits 0 or 1 — quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which can essentially exist in multiple states at one time. 

Qubits can be made out of different types of quanta, like electrons or photons, and entities are pursuing varying approaches around those to develop the first-ever practical, fault-tolerant and large-scale quantum computer. In this photonic approach-based work, PsiQuantum and AFRL will produce special quantum photonic chips that can be “used to control and process qubits” based on particles of light, or single photons, according to the release.

“The deep silicon photonics expertise of PsiQuantum is critical in our mission to not only accelerate the advancement and deployment of [QIS], but in developing capabilities to meet the needs of the emerging national security landscape,” AFRL Deputy Director Michael Hayduk said in a statement. 

He added that this partnership supports both the lab’s and the Defense Department’s broader missions of “pursuing long-term, broad-based research programs that ultimately lead to world-changing applications across multiple industries.”

Officials from PsiQuantum and AFRL will manufacture the chips at GlobalFoundries’ semiconductor fab in Malta, New York. Last year, PsiQuantum and GlobalFoundries announced what they deemed to be the first single photon detector built in a silicon chip — a new capability to read out the value of a qubit’s state.

This partnership is largely supported by the $25 million in federal funding that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., previously unveiled as part of the spending package for fiscal 2022.

In the latest release, Schumer said this collaboration “will strengthen our national security, create good-paying jobs, and further fuel Upstate New York’s leadership in the tech economy to help the U.S. stay ahead of all rivals, including China, in technological innovation.”

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Semiconductors are embedded in and power many critical modern-day technologies, like computers, smartphones, pacemakers, vehicles, the electric grid and much more. Microchips originated in America during the 1950s, but today, the nation consumes roughly half of those made worldwide. At the same time, only around 12% of microchips are currently manufactured in the U.S., which creates supply chain vulnerabilities.

In 2020, Purdue University announced it was selected to steer a national initiative sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to confront the escalating need for engineering graduates specializing in microelectronics. That multi-university public-private-academic partnership — the Scalable Asymmetric Lifecycle Engagement Microelectronics Workforce Development program (SCALE) — saw an initial investment from the Pentagon of $19.2 million.

Purdue officials confirmed on Monday that the DOD has moved to expand SCALE with a commitment of $10.8 million in additional funding and a possible ceiling of $99 million.

“Part of the rationale for expansion is to continue existing work in areas like system-on-chip and embedded systems security / trusted artificial intelligence. The other part of the rationale was to extend the mission to K-12 programs, with an initial small-scale pilot aimed at providing a national model for introducing context and content to K-12 teachers, staff, and students,” Peter Bermel, SCALE director and the Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, told DefenseScoop in an email Monday.

The U.S. will need 50,000 trained semiconductor engineers to meet rapidly increasing demand in the near term, according to Bermel, meaning there’s more room for students to support government and defense contractor requirements. 

“This is a unique opportunity to both help students pursue highly impactful career opportunities, meet national needs, and update the university programs to reflect the rapidly-changing research and educational landscape in this area,” he said.

Managed by the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane), SCALE connects faculty from nearly 20 universities, and experts from dozens of entities across the government and defense industry, with the ultimate goal of ensuring the U.S. has a personnel pipeline necessary to meet next-generation national security needs. Academic institutions involved are frequently informed by the dozens of public and private stakeholders on expectations for new entrants of the microelectronics-focused workforce, and typically update their curricula to reflect those insights. 

SCALE-enrolled undergraduate and graduate students can receive mentoring and research opportunities from the organizations involved, and there are also pathways for internships and job placements.  

The program is evolving, but as of June, government and industry partners included the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Missile Defense Agency, Space Force, NASA, multiple military research labs, Boeing, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — among many others. 

“SCALE’s impact includes reaching 287 students at 17 universities; 17 defense industry partners; and 17 government partners, with more to come in the near future,” Bermel told DefenseScoop.

In a recent survey of students associated with SCALE, 73% of respondents reported being hired into “a suitable summer internship or research position,” he said. The majority of those who participated in the survey also reported positive experiences around the mentoring provided. 

“Recent SCALE graduates, predominantly undergraduates so far, have been reported as going onto defense industrial base companies and graduate study,” Bermel said.

With the five-year expansion and extension from DOD, officials intend to grow student participation in SCALE fivefold — to more than 1,000 — and cooperate with community colleges to create microelectronics courses across the nation.

Microelectronics is a top priority for Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu, and it’s listed among 14 technology areas of critical importance to the Pentagon.

This new announcement also follows the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, which revamps and advances domestic capabilities to drive the making of such nanotechnologies. 

In addition to SCALE, Purdue is leading other strategic initiatives to boost microelectronics development, including the MidWest Research Regional Hub effort, the first comprehensive semiconductor degree program conducted in partnership with SkyWater Technology, that is expected to generate a $1.8 billion future state-of-the-art chips manufacturing facility.

The Indiana-based university currently houses the Birck Nanotechnology Center — a facility focused on the production of microelectronics and semiconductors, as well as capabilities in other, generally related, disciplines.

In the last few months, U.S. government leaders including Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo have visited the center.

After touring the facility in August, where she observed microelectronics unfold in real-time, Hicks told faculty, researchers and students “there is no understating how critical that work is.”

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