The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is playing a key role in establishing materials science as a discipline. With its latest program, “Additive Manufacturing of Microelectronic systEms” (AMME), the agency is striving to take microsystems manufacturing far beyond the current state of the art.
AMME aims to improve microsystems manufacturing through technological breakthroughs in the production of novel, multi-material microsystems with tremendous speed, throughput and resolution. This additive manufacturing process is intended to provide commercial devices with innovative add-on technologies and the ability to rapidly respond to mission requirements – similar to how additive manufacturing has transformed complex prototyping. With AMME, DARPA aims to overcome fundamental limitations specific to microsystems.
“AMME is based on new insights from selective material synthesis and volumetric additive manufacturing that would enable a new class of microsystems,” explains Michael Sangillo, AMME program manager. “We want to break the design rules imposed by conventional manufacturing tools and demonstrate novel microsystems that create new opportunities for national security and emerging applications.”
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