RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. (Nov. 21, 2019) — An Army-funded project may boost 5G and mm-Wave technologies, improving military communications and sensing equipment.

Carbonics, Inc., partnered with the University of Southern California to develop a carbon nanotube technology that, for the first time, achieved speeds exceeding 100GHz in radio frequency applications. The milestone eclipses the performance — and efficiency — of traditional Radio Frequency Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor, known as RF-CMOS technology, that is ubiquitous in modern consumer electronics, including cell phones.

“This milestone shows that carbon nanotubes, long thought to be a promising communications chip technology, can deliver,” said Dr. Joe Qiu, program manager, solid state and electromagnetics at the Army Research Office. “The next step is scaling this technology, proving that it can work in high-volume manufacturing. Ultimately, this technology could help the Army meet its needs in communications, radar, electronic warfare and other sensing applications.”

The research was published in the journal Nature Electronics.

The work, funded by ARO, an element of U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, is a part of a Small Business Technology Transfer Program. The program focuses on feasibility studies leading to prototype demonstration of technology for specific applications.

For nearly two decades, researchers have theorized that carbon nanotubes would be well suited as a high-frequency transistor technology due to its unique one-dimensional electron transport characteristics. The engineering challenge has been to assemble the high-purity semiconducting nanotubes into densely aligned arrays and create a working device out of the nanomaterial.

Carbonics, a venture backed start-up, and USC, successfully overcame this challenge. Projections based on scaling single carbon nanotube device metrics suggest the technology could ultimately far exceed the top-tier incumbent RF technology, Gallium Arsenide.

Carbonics employs a deposition technology called ZEBRA that enables carbon nanotubes to be densely aligned and deposited onto a variety of chip substrates including silicon, silicon-on-insulator, quartz and flexible materials. This allows the technology to be directly integrated with traditional CMOS digital logic circuits, overcoming the typical problem of heterogeneous integration.

“With this exciting accomplishment, the timing is ripe to leverage our CMOS-compatible technology for the 5G and mm-Wave defense communication markets,” said Carbonics’ CEO Kos Galatsis. “We are now engaged in licensing and technology transfer partnerships with industry participants, while we continue to advance this disruptive RF technology.”

In 2014, Carbonics spun-out from the joint center of UCLA-USC and King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia called the Center of Excellence for Green Nanotechnologies.

The research is based in part, on work funded by the Army more than 10 years ago at University of California Irvine. A graduate student who worked on that project for his doctoral thesis research, Dr. Christopher Rutherglen, is now Carbonics’ chief technology officer.

By U.S. Army CCDC Army Research Laboratory Public Affairs

To address Soldier feedback requesting easier and faster ways to plan and manage the Army’s advanced software defined radios, such as the 2-Channel Leader Radio, the service is piloting a new software tool suite that reduces the time it takes to initialize, plan and load a brigade’s worth of radios, from four weeks to minutes.

These new user-friendly software prototypes also lay the foundation for rapid unit task reorganization and enable tasks once performed by advanced Signal Soldiers to be performed by general purpose users for increased operational flexibility.

The Army’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical (PEO C3T) leveraged its Unified Network Operations Middle Tier Acquisition (UNO MTA) authority to develop these pioneering capabilities in just three months, compared to a traditional full custom Army development effort that would have taken 12 to 18 months, or more.

“Our new user-friendly Network Operations planning and management software prototype tools work hand-in-hand to initialize, plan and load a brigade’s worth of radios faster than ever before,” said Cpt. Nicholas Milano, assistant product manager for Tactical Cyber & Network Operations, Project Manager Tactical Network, assigned to PEO C3T. “Each integrated piece of software works in unison in an end-to-end network planning and initialization workflow.”

The prototype software tool suite includes:

– The Integrated Planner: an overarching system that plans and creates configuration files for numerous network elements, including the software defined radios supporting the Army’s tactical network. This planner was developed to integrate or replace existing network planners.

– Network Operations Management System (NOMS): an overarching prototype system used to manage the network and support non-classified, classified and coalition network enclaves with common look, touch, feel, and functionality.

– Initialization Tool Suite (ITS): enables Soldiers to manage and modify their network initialization data products network design on the ground in theater. Data Products provide the information required to enable end-to-end network connectivity and interoperability across the Army’s tactical internet.

— Codex: an authoritative database with a common data model and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), enabling standard access to the data product network design. APIs enable applications to “talk” to each other.

— Atom: a simplified radio planner that provides intuitive workflow and an open API that uses the data product network design to provide a radio waveform plan. The Atom prototype will inform enhancements and future capability and fielding decisions on the final new solution to support existing and emerging planning requirements, potentially replacing the legacy Joint Enterprise Network Management Capability.

–Black Sails: a simplified radio configuration tool that uses the waveform plan through an open API to configure software defined lower tactical internet radios. Atom and Black Sails work hand-in-hand — Atom creates the plan and Black Sails generates the configuration files and loads the radios.

The UNO MTA is helping the PEO rapidly deliver a more robust, integrated, and standardized set of network management capabilities that enable Soldiers from tactical edge up through corps to plan, configure, manage, monitor, provision and secure/defend their network assets. UNO efforts simplify and reduce the number of tools Soldiers use to manage and defend the tactical communications network.

“We are leveraging the OTAs to prototype solutions to configure and integrate tactical and enterprise networks, enabling the delivery of information and communications among Soldiers at all echelons, utilizing network resources prioritized according the commander’s intent,” Milano said.

To create the unified radio planning and management software tool suite, the UNO MTA team-of-teams concentrated on prototyping commercial-off-the-shelf software applications for network planning and management, integrating them into existing government programs of record, and then quickly inserting them into military formations to gain feedback for further enhancements and to support future Army capability decisions.

The team is working with operational units to pilot these software tools and leverage Soldier feedback to inform requirements as part of the Army’s developing Integrated Tactical Network, or ITN. The ITN capabilities work together to enable commanders to leverage both military and commercially available networks for secure and reliable multi pathway communications and information sharing between Army, joint and coalition partners. The ITN commercial-off-the-shelf equipment includes new expeditionary satellite terminals, line-of-sight backhaul, mobile broadband kits, radio waveforms, a two-channel Leader Radio, single channel radios, end user devices, network gateways, unified network operations tools and data products.

As part of a developmental operations construct, PEO C3T engineers are implementing continuous exploration, integration, and deployment of the software prototypes that include quarterly Soldier touch points with various units, including the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division; 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division; and the 10th Mountain Division. Using this common cadence, each program office has the dedicated resources necessary to continuously define, build, test and deliver value to the Army, said Keith Whittaker, network planning product lead for PM Tactical Network.

“We gain continuous feedback on the prototype design, which is immediately fed back into the software development sprint cycles, to be refined again as part of the next quarterly release cycle,” Whittaker said. “This construct has already proven its value, enabling the program offices to observe Soldiers interacting with prototype mock-ups before a single line of code is ever written.”

Through requests for proposals and technical exchange meetings–initiated by the Network-Cross Functional Team– PEO C3T determined the best options for integrating existing capabilities with minimum development efforts.

Throughout the development process of the radio planning and management software tool suite, the team purposely laid a foundation for an open framework and open standards, including open APIs.

“This open architecture ensures future DoD software and system development can most effectively and efficiently share information between systems and more easily and rapidly integrate future systems to improve functionality and capability,” Whitaker said.

The open construct will be critical to future network modernization endeavors, as the DoD continues to develop integrated capability, such as the ITN, which includes multiple vendors, hardware, software, configurations, and systems that overarch multiple programs.

Story by Amy Walker, PM Tactical Network, PEO C3T public affairs

Photos by Kathy Bailey, PEO C3T public affairs and 1st BCT, 82nd Airborne Division public affairs