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Irvine Sensors Wins DARPA Award For 3D Electronic Tech

Irvine Sensors Corporation announced that it is leading an industrial team that has been selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ("DARPA") as one of the winners in an industry competition to develop 3- dimensional electronics technology intended to continue United States' dominance of high performance integrated circuits. The new Irvine Sensors program, dubbed 3D Mint, is a multi-year, $8.6 million contract, including options. The first phase of the program is for approximately $3.2 million over 18 months and has the goal to demonstrate processing speeds and packaging densities that are orders of magnitude improvements over that achievable with conventional state-of-the-art electronics. Subsequent phases are planned to develop hardware usable for specific military applications that is also potentially transferable to commercial use. The Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio will manage the program on behalf of DARPA.

John Carson, Irvine Sensors' President, said, "DARPA has recognized that, while 3-D electronics technology is inevitable, U.S. dominance of this field should not be taken for granted. The new DARPA initiative provides an impetus to achieve broad military support for 3-D electronics, while engaging major commercial electronic companies that can help establish and maintain a U.S. leadership position. We formed our team with this objective in mind. Raytheon will provide our defense applications leadership, and Micron Technologies, Xilinx and Sun Microsystems have agreed to help to generate pathways into commercial practice."

Irvine Sensors has been a leading source of innovation in the field of 3- dimensional electronics for nearly 25 years. During that period, the Company has introduced 3-D electronics to a wide variety of military and government applications, including high density memory for space data recorders, ultra high performance neural networks for target recognition and tracking, integrated processors for ballistic missile defense, high performance laser radar imaging and miniature embedded computers. Irvine Sensors began to broaden its proprietary technology beyond military applications to potential commercial uses in the 1990s, working in conjunction with IBM. Other corporations also began entering the commercial 3-D electronics arena during that decade, including such firms as Texas Instruments, Intel, AMD, StakTek, DPAC Technologies and Samsung. However, to date commercial applications of 3-D electronics have largely been limited to components. The technical goal of the new 3D Mint program is to extend the use of 3-D electronics to entire computational systems to realize the speed, capacity, power and economic advantages that such higher level use can potentially bring.

The new 3D Mint contract was the largest pending element included in the over $19 million of new and pending government contracts that Irvine Sensors announced on May 10, 2004. With the receipt of the 3d Mint contract, approximately $17 million of that previously announced $19 million total has been awarded.