Sometime later this year, perhaps around July, the Department of Defense is expected to announce the sites and focus of up to nine hubs associated with the Microelectronics Commons (MEC) program. Funded and broadly described as part of the CHIPS Act, the MEC hubs are intended to provide prototyping capabilities for a range of critical technologies, including quantum information science. The MEC facilities would be made available to academia and industry to address the so-called “Valley of Death” gap between POC projects and capacity production.

“There has been thinking that there’s a gap in the innovation chain,” said Celia Merzbacher, executive director of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C). “We have a lot of investment in universities, including facilities for doing research-type fabrication and characterization. There’s quite a lot of infrastructure at universities and that supports very basic R&D activities. Then you have, of course, in the microelectronics or semiconductor world, you’ve got manufacturing that is extremely oriented toward high volume, very defined processes. Not a lot of experimentation is allowed.”

CHIPS – part of the CHIPS and Science Act – accelerated the thinking around tackling the prototyping gap and provided a timely platform and funding. More broadly, of course, CHIPS is intended to quickly increase U.S.-based production capabilities, mostly in semiconductors, but also in other key technologies.

“There’s a Valley of Death – we don’t have low volume fabrication and manufacturing capabilities yet. [MEC organizers] talked about that gap and a gap, frankly, in qualified workers who are going to be part of this growing ecosystem. So, although [MEC] is fairly targeted (i.e. DOD technology needs), they do say throughout the MEC documents that it is intended to support not just the defense industrial base companies. This is an area where it’s by definition really going to be sort of dual use. The capabilities they want to create are supposed to be available to commercial developers and academic innovators, but presumably ones that need something more reproducible and scalable than is available in the existing university environment.”

As envisioned MEC would create nine hubs covering six technology focus areas. Roughly $2 billion in funding for MEC was included in the CHIPS legislation and the program is being administered by the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL) with awards issued as Other Transaction Agreements (OTA) – “non-traditional government contracting methods designed to help fast-track research initiatives and prototype innovation.” OTA are typically more flexible and implemented faster than other government contracts.

Fairly extensive documentation for MEC can be found on the NSTXL website.

Many details are only now becoming clear. There had been some early confusion. Early guidance implied that the hubs would be regional; that was changed when questions arose about including members from outside the region. Having a regional flavor is now a secondary consideration. Other questions arose around how many of the target technologies could be included in hub proposals. There were hub proposals for having multiple technologies.

“I think people were sort of creating their concepts to cover all the bases. [MEC] came out and said, ‘No, we want a separate proposal for every technology focus area that you’re going to go after’,” said Merzbacher.

The deadline for MEC hub proposals was February 28 and they are now being evaluated. Presumably the resulting hubs will be open to many. MEC is, of course, intended to bolster U.S. and more specifically DOD capabilities in prototyping key technologies. That said, following questions from potential program participants, it’s been made clear that some U.S. allies – notably NATO members and Australia, for example – are welcome. There’s a fair breadth of technologies being tackled.

Focusing on the quantum side, QED-C expressed support for the MEC program early on and has since worked with SRI International, which manages QED-C, on submitting a quantum hub proposal and it’s not hard to imagine SRI submitting other hub proposals for other technologies.

“I was delighted, as I said in a statement that we put out, and QED-C is going to get behind whoever wins and push and help and make it a success. My thinking going in was we’ll just wait and see what comes out of this process. But a number of QED-C members came to us and said, ‘I certainly hope that SRI is going to submit and lead one of these proposals,’ So after a few of those calls we decided that we would indeed submit a proposal from SRI. QED-C is not a legal entity so it will be submitted by SRI with a lot of thought to leveraging QED-C. But SRI would be the manager and then various QED-C members and whoever was the right partners would become hub participants,” she said.

Merzbacher didn’t provide many details about the SRI/QED-C proposal. It is, after all, a competition.

“If they wanted something that was more or less regional, we will probably not be selected. We asked the community, if you could spend $100 million on prototyping capabilities, what would you want, and then we took this big laundry list and pruned it so that we could get at least sort of an 80% solution. That would be something we could do with the first tranche of funding. But even with $100 million available, it wasn’t enough to do everything that might need to be done.

“We prioritized a bit and put together a team that would provide prototyping capabilities. There’s a separate MEC document called the technical guidance document (downloadable from MEC summary page) and that has just two pages on each technical focus area. I encourage you to take a look at that. You’ll see where it talks about quantum talks about establishing foundry-like capabilities that will be available to the sort of full research community to do prototyping of quantum,” said Merzbacher.

It’s hard to imagine a single hub encompassing most quantum technologies. There are so many. Not only are there diverse qubit technologies that underlie quantum computing systems (superconducting, trapped ion, neutral atom, photonic, diamond vacancy, etc.), many requiring vastly different production means, but also there are all the subsystems involved and even cryogenic systems. What’s more, there are vigorous efforts going on in quantum networking, quantum memory, quantum sensing, and more. Maybe there will be two quantum MEC hubs.

It will be interesting to see what emerges, not just in QIS but in all of the targeted technologies. Early plans called for award announcements in the spring but that’s since slipped. Summer 2023 is now thought likely, perhaps helped by pressure to get funding into the current government fiscal year, which ends on September 30.

Stay tuned.