Chakrabarty Appointed to DARPA Microsystems Exploratory Council

Krishnendu Chakrabarty, the John Cocke Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, has been appointed to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Microsystems Exploratory Council (MEC), for a term of three years.

The MEC was established in 2017 with the aim of providing DARPA’s technical offices with continuous assessments of the state of microelectronics applications as they relate to national security issues.

Chakrabarty will bring his expertise in 3D integration of heterogeneous technologies and hardware security, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators and domain customization, to the council.

“The cross-cutting research areas in microsystems technology that the council will explore is tremendously exciting,” said Chakrabarty. “I’m eager to see how the council’s future explorations might benefit from my group’s knowledge, and also to enrich our pioneering research at Duke with the expertise of other council members who have widely divergent focal areas.”

He plans to encourage the MEC to explore ways to achieve 3D integration and packaging of an array of advanced computing technologies including non-volatile memories, AI accelerators, sensors, microfluidics, and optics. Chakrabarty said the council can specifically study how AI-driven system architectures can empower next-generation cyberphysical and secure microsystems—an area that has gained huge traction at Duke in the past year with the launch of the NSF AI Institute for Edge Computing Leveraging Next Generation Networks, known as “Athena,” which is headquartered at Duke Engineering.

Chakrabarty’s research group at Duke has worked on several DARPA projects over the years, on topics ranging from wireless sensor networks to 3D integrated circuits. He is currently leading research on design-for-test of monolithic 3D integrated circuits based on carbon-nanotube transistors, as part of the DARPA Electronic Resurgence Initiative.