[HN Gopher] DARPA and Texas Bet $1.4B on Unique Foundry -3D hete...
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DARPA and Texas Bet $1.4B on Unique Foundry -3D heterogeneous
integration
Author : pseudolus
Score : 67 points
Date : 2025-11-11 11:33 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| osnium123 wrote:
| Skywater Technology offers similar services as well. Competition
| is good but does the US risk funding too many subscale entities?
|
| https://www.skywatertechnology.com/heterogeneous-integration...
| wbl wrote:
| The US will fund as many people who will develop this tech as
| need be. The national champion approach produces a too big to
| fail lazy company.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Wouldn't any form of government funding produce a lazy
| company vs companies standing on their own two feet with the
| free market acting as drill sergeant?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Suppose you have to do some R&D in order to make something
| happen. There is no way to keep it a secret and China isn't
| going to enforce a patent on it, so if you pay to do the
| R&D and then have to charge prices high enough to recover
| it, they undercut you on price and you go out of business.
| But if the government covers the R&D then you can do
| domestic production at a competitive price.
|
| Meanwhile the subsidy should be going to every company in
| the industry so then they still have to compete with each
| other.
|
| Or to put it a different way, what's really the difference
| between a subsidy and a tax cut?
| wbl wrote:
| The funding can get companies spun up and competing.
| oxw wrote:
| Chip stacking today is limited by thermal management. Can't stack
| multiple high TDP (e.g. logic) chips together, can only do one +
| low power chips (e.g. memory). Wonder if this is something DARPA
| is trying to solve here.
| inshard wrote:
| If we are thinking about world models and embodied AI as the next
| big wave, I feel we need to factor the size of this market across
| military and civilian applications. When I hear Tesla AI4-6 plans
| for autonomous driving and Optimus, Apple's home robot, and many
| such initiatives, I'm also thinking of an autonomous military
| drone arms race and autonomous space exploration and moon
| colonization. Edge compute will be a key innovation and I feel
| Apple is gonna be best placed to exploit their power efficient
| M-series architectures.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Battlefield robots already exist. They just don't look like you
| and me. And mostly they fly. That word "embodied"is a broad
| hint at misunderstanding. Robot surgeons don't stand on
| humanoid feet next to the operating table, and they don't have
| humanoid "hands."
|
| Boston Dynamics has had humanoid robots doing parkour for years
| now and nobody needs a robot to do parkour. This was also a
| hint.
| inshard wrote:
| Do we need to distinguish between Atlas, the control theory
| based humanoid tech stack vs say Optimus that may run on an
| end-2-end visual reasoning world model? I feel these are two
| different paradigms. Same for military drones. The next gen
| prototypes may have launch-and-forget levels of autonomy,
| however ethically questionable.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Isn't Optimus the robot made by that guy who thinks it's
| going to be a "fantastic surgeon?"
| diamond559 wrote:
| Humanoid robots are a joke to pump stocks. Don't fall for the
| hype.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| Because America can no longer guarantee the safety of Taiwan or
| bear the risk of having TSMC shutdown?
| sailfast wrote:
| This sounds like a cool initiative, but I am curious where Texas
| is coming up with the $552M for this investment.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Looks like it's part of a larger effort to invest in
| semiconductors: https://gov.texas.gov/business/page/texas-
| chips-office
|
| The Texas state government's annual budget is well over $300
| billion, so it's not a huge amount of money for them.
| silisili wrote:
| I was curious if this was just via tax breaks and whatnot, but
| apparently not.
|
| If my light research is correct, Texas founded its own CHIPS
| act in 2023, and shortly after appropriated 552 mil to the UT
| TIE program. The DARPA money commitment came a year later.
| Animats wrote:
| This makes sense for chips that integrate sensing and processing
| on the same chip. The military tends to need things like that.
| LIDAR sensors need both sensing and fast counting, which often
| use different semiconductor technologies. The first flash LIDAR
| chips had an InGaAs sensor chip and a CMOS counting chip, both
| ball grid arrays, soldered back to back. If different technology
| layers on the same chip can do the job, that would simplify the
| parts.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| It doesn't just simplify, it improves capability and saves
| power because it makes it much easier and cheaper in power to
| build an extremely wide interface between them.
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