ARLINGTON, Va. – U.S. military researchers are approaching industry for new kinds of very-large-scale photonic circuits for applications in computing, analog signal processing, and sensing.
Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., issued a solicitation (DARPA-PS-26-13) on Wednesday for the Photonic Integrated Circuit Architectures for Scalable System Objectives (PICASSO) project.
PICASSO aims to revolutionize photonic circuit architectures, from compute to light detection and ranging, by expanding from individual components to integrated microelectronics systems with performance measured at the system level.
Although photonic integrated systems could help improve bandwidth, latency, and energy efficiency for computing, analog signal processing, and sensing, photonic circuits today are limited and struggle to exceed the performance of traditional electronics.
Technology limitations
There are two primary limitations to scaling of circuit size and functionality: preserving optical signal integrity while minimizing excess noise; and spurious wave interactions that limit predictable behavior.
Systems designers today handle these challenges by transduction and reconditioning the optical signals electronically, yet heavy use of electronics prevents system-level gains in latency, efficiency, and bandwidth, which photonics handles natively. The search for components with ideal performance cannot solve the problem of limited scaling.
PICASSO will emphasize four pillars: generalizability by testing different use cases and ruling out point solutions; interoperability, through defining and enforcing interface boundary conditions and capturing them in an interface control document; accessibility and reuse, through requiring delivery of functional circuits with documented performance; and technological sustainability by creating a domestically controlled repository for photonic designs.
DARPA is asking industry to identify compelling applications and systems designs that use photonic integrated circuits. The program seeks to make the most of optical processing and avoid optical-to-electrical transduction.
Photonic foundries
DARPA researchers prefer using U.S.-based domestic photonic foundries and assembly and packaging services where available for very-large-scale photonic circuits; proposals should justify any use of offshore facilities.
PICASSO will develop circuit-level design approaches to preserve the integrity of optical signals and suppress and decouple parasitic interactions across photonic circuits. A separate solicitation, to be issued later, will use follow-up with circuit designs for government use cases.
Companies interested should submit abstracts no later than 2 Feb. 2026, and proposals no later than 6 March 2026 to the DARPA BAA Tool online at https://baa.darpa.mil no later than 2 Feb. 2026. The project should begin next July.
Email questions or concerns to DARPA at [email protected]. More information is online at https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/201e08ca8e1d466eae791de8863cea9b/view.
