Arm and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have announced a three-year partnership agreement to “enable the research community that supports DARPA’s programs to quickly and easily take advantage of Arm’s leading IP, tools and support, accelerating innovation in a variety of fields.”
Under the auspices of DARPA’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative, the agreement establishes an access framework to commercially available Arm technology, the organizations said. Arm has established a growing position on the HPC landscape, including serving as the core architecture for the world’s current no. 1-ranked supercomputer, Fugaku, at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan (see “ARM-based Fugaku Supercomputer on Summit of New Top500 – Surpasses Exaflops on AI Benchmark.”
“The span of DARPA research activity opens up a huge range of opportunities for future technological innovation,” said Rene Haas, president, IP Products Group, Arm. “Our expanded DARPA partnership will provide them with access to the broadest range of Arm technology to develop compute solutions supported by the world’s largest ecosystem of tools, services and software.”
Arm, which said it shipped more than 170 billion Arm-based chips to date, is utilized in “distributed intelligence from cloud to edge and endpoint,” according to Arm. “The expanded partnership enables DARPA researchers to have the flexibility and scalability to access vertical market compute from small embedded sensors to high-performance systems,” the organization said.
“DARPA’s programs within the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) focus on the most advanced challenges in microelectronics,” said Serge Leef, who leads design automation and secure hardware programs in MTO, “equipping our community with best in class technologies is essential not only for break-through scientific and engineering advances, but also for improved transition into military and commercial applications.”
In its announcement, Arm stated that “multidimensional collaboration” is key to DARPA’s work. “An Arm IP license gives the DARPA community a portal to the world’s largest open compute ecosystem of silicon designers and software developers, enabling the lowest SoC build costs and smallest risk profile,” according to Arm. “Projects can transition from concepts to real-world deployments in a fast and efficient way, with guidance on everything from hardware verification to physical implementation and software development.”
