The Promise of Nano and Micro Systems for Meeting the Emerging Demands of the US Army

The rapidly changing defense landscape and the exponential increase in complex challenges and threats faced by our warfighters demand revolutionary advances across the spectrum and even a rethinking of current combat doctrine. Sensors and Electron devices are critical elements in a number of application form providing situational awareness to battlefield operations. Enabling nano and micro system approaches offer the potential to fulfill Army needs in applications such as chemical and biological sensors, high-frequency and low-power electronics, micro autonomous systems, micro power generation, specialized optical sources and detectors and much more. A large part of the advances thus far originate in insights and understanding of the underlying materials. I will review some emerging needs with recent illustrative examples from the field and will follow up with potential solutions that are being developed within ARL and our Army partners. These include RF MEMS for electronically scanned antennas, carbon nanotube and other nanostructure based chemical/biological sensors, biomimetic approaches to materials development for power storage applications and nanostructured semiconductors for integrated electronics and energetics.