The Pentagon is sinking $75 million over the next five years into the development of flexible hybrid electronics that could yield increasingly advanced wearable devices, improved health monitoring systems or better sensors.
The initiative, announced on Friday by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter during his trip to Silicon Valley, pulls together a consortium of 162 companies, universities and non-profit organizations, which will bring $90 million of their own funds to the table.
The Manufacturing Innovation Institute (MII) for Flexible Hybrid Electronics in San Jose, Calif., will be led by the FlexTech Alliance, a research and trade association. Other high profile defense contractors and commercial companies such as Lockheed Martin [LMT], Xerox [XRX] and Apple [AAPL] have signed on, as have major universities like Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Air Force Research Laboratory will manage the cooperative agreement.
Flexible electronics are manufactured by printing circuitry and sensors onto bendable, stretchable substrates. While the technology is still young, futurists have imagined using flexible electronics to one day embed smartphone-like capabilities into the fabric of a uniform or to easily add a new capability without needing to make hardware changes to a plane or ship.
“Our industry partners will be able to shape electronics to things after decades of having to do it the other way around,” Carter said. “Wounded warriors will benefit from smart prosthetics that have the full flexibility of human skin.”
“The reality though is that, as I stand here in front of you today, we don’t know all of the applications this new technology will make possible. That’s the remarkable thing about innovation, and that’s another reason why America and America’s military must get there first,” he added.
Since Carter became Defense Secretary, he has made strengthening the Pentagon’s ties with Silicon Valley a priority. In April, he formed the Defense Innovation Unit–Experimental (DIUx) office to give the department a permanent presence in Silicon Valley to reach out to innovative commercial technology companies.
Following his announcement, Carter is set to host the first ever roundtable of Silicon Valley leaders at DIUx and will visit LinkedIn to discover how DOD can better compete for most talented professionals and new graduates, he said.
The flexible electronics institute will be responsible for program direction, integrating components, creating prototypes and maturing manufacturing readiness levels, a FlexTech news release stated. It will distribute research and development dollars though competitively-bid project calls, and industry-generated technology roadmaps will drive project calls, timelines and investments.
“The intent of the MII is to draw in the country’s ‘best of the best’ scientists, engineers, manufacturing experts and business development professionals in the field of flexible hybrid electronics,” stated Malcolm Thompson, executive director-designate of the institute.
The technologies developed by the institute have the potential to benefit not only the military, but commercial sectors, such as automotive, communications, consumer electronics, health care, transportation, logistics and agriculture, the organization stated in the release.
The flexible electronics hub is the seventh Manufacturing Innovation Institute launched by the Obama administration to spur the development of innovative manufacturing technologies—such as 3D printing and digital manufacturing— and create jobs.