On Friday, Ashton Carter, the Defense Secretary, landed at Moffett Federal Airfield marking his second visit to the Silicon Valley in last four months.
Advertisement
The U.S. Department of Defense is sinking funds into a Silicon Valley initiative aimed at creating “flexible” electronics, furthering the agency’s commitment to investing in innovative devices that could help soldiers on the battlefield.
“The challenge is always, when you’ve developed a concept in the lab… what are the steps you have to take to get it to market”, said Atashbar.
Managing the Institute will be a consortium of 162 companies, universities and other groups, “from Boeing, Apple and Harvard, to Advantest Akron Polymer Systems and Kalamazoo Valley Community College”, Carter said, according to Reuters.
During his first trip to Silicon Valley in April, Carter launched a new program called Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental aimed at scouting out promising emerging technologies and beefing up the Pentagon’s ability to work with high-tech firms.
This undertaking is the seventh such private-public partnership to be introduced by the Obama administration.
Todd Park, the former chief technology officer of the United States, and Mikey Dickerson, who led a team of 60 engineers at Google and supervised the crew that fixed the Healthcare.gov website previous year… have been steadily recruiting an elite digital corps-a startup team, essentially, built mainly from the ranks of top private-sector companies-and embedding them within the U.S. government.
President and CEO of FlexTech Alliance Michael Ciesinski stated that “FlexTech is privileged to accept this award from the Defense Department to stand up and lead the FHE MII [Flexible Hybrid Electronics Innovation Institute]…” The partnership will be managed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
The idea is to create a set of high-end 3D printed technologies to produce flexible electronic equipment embedded with sensors.
The San Jose-based institute will focus on developing wearable technologies that could be used to assist wounded soldiers, automobiles and aircrafts in harsh environments and light weight robotics, among others applications, the department said.
Advertisement
Carter also met on Friday with the Defence Science Board for a briefing on its latest study on how autonomous military drones and robots should be in the future.
