Contact: Michael Baum, michael.baum@nist.gov
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NIST 94-16
April 25, 1994
Media Contact: ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM
Michael Baum, (301) 975-2763 ANNOUNCES FIVE MAJOR TECHNOLOGY
AREAS FOR LONG-RANGE, FOCUSED
SUPPORT
The Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards
and Technology today announced five areas of technology for
industry development through the department's Advanced
Technology Program. These are the first subjects for focused
technology programs under the ATP.
The ATP has received over 550 "white papers" from
industry detailing suggested program areas since last October.
Based on ideas from more than 150 of the papers, the five new
R&D programs will be cost shared and carried out by industry.
A five-year government investment of $745 million is expected
to leverage an equal investment by industry.
It is anticipated the five new ATP focused program
areas -- all driven by industrial concerns -- will yield real
benefits to the nation's economy by fostering powerful
technologies leading to new or improved world-class products
and industrial processes. They range from advanced materials
technology to innovative information technologies, and
include:
> Tools for DNA Diagnostics -- a five-year, $145 million
program to develop compact, low-cost, automated DNA
analysis technologies and equipment to enable fast,
inexpensive detection and diagnosis of human, animal and
plant diseases.
> Information Infrastructure for Healthcare -- a five-year,
$185 million program to develop critical information
infrastructure technologies to enable enhanced, more
fully integrated medical information systems across the
healthcare industry, greatly reducing costs and errors in
handling medical information.
> Manufacturing Composite Structures -- a five-year,
$160 million program to reduce the high initial costs of
using advanced composite materials, traditionally found
only in military and sports applications, to enable the
use of these strong, lightweight, durable materials in
large-scale commercial applications such as bridges and
automobiles.
> Component-Based Software -- a five-year, $150 million
program to develop the technologies necessary to enable
systematically reusable software components -- small,
carefully engineered software elements suitable for
automated assembly in a broad array of applications.
> Computer-Integrated Manufacturing for Electronics -- a
five-year, $105 million program to develop a flexible,
software-based framework needed to promote greater
manufacturability, productivity and product variety in
the electronics industry -- allowing U.S. firms to more
easily scale up and reconfigure their manufacturing
operations.
Specific program areas such as the five announced today
are based on ideas suggested by industry and evaluated against
four criteria: the potential for U.S. economic benefit, the
strength of the technical ideas, evidence of strong industry
commitment, and the opportunity for ATP funds to make a
significant difference.
The ATP accepts proposals for research projects only in
response to specific competition announcements published in
Commerce Business Daily. Today's announcement does not
constitute a call for proposals under any of the five program
areas. Competition announcements will be made in each of the
announced program areas within the next few weeks.
The proposed funding levels for the five programs in
FY 1995 and beyond are contingent on future appropriations for
the ATP.
Since 1990, the ATP has worked with U.S. industry to
advance the nation's economic competitiveness by helping to
fund the development of high-risk but powerful new
technologies that underlie a broad spectrum of potential new
applications, commercial products and services. The ATP
accelerates technologies that, because they are risky, are
unlikely to be developed in time to compete in rapidly
changing world markets without such a partnership of industry
and government. By sharing the cost of such projects, the ATP
catalyzes industry to pursue promising technologies.
The ATP selects specific research projects for support
based on competitions in which project proposals are evaluated
for the strengths of their technology and business plans.
The five programs announced today reflect the continued
growth of the ATP, which will seek to maximize its impact on
the economy by focusing a significant share of its resources
on specific programs with well-defined technological and
business goals. These typically involve the parallel
development of interlocking R&D projects that will complement
and reinforce each other.
Programs run five or more years -- with an established
termination date -- and require about $20 million to
$50 million per year from the ATP, although both the duration
and level of funding depend on the scope of the program as
project proposals are received from industry.
The ATP continues to evaluate program recommendations
already received and welcomes additional program suggestions
at any time. The ATP plans to announce as many as six
additional focused programs around November 1994 for the next
year, depending on funding and industry suggestions for
programs.
The ATP continues to conduct general competitions open to
all areas of technology. The fifth general competition,
announced March 21, is now under way.
Further details on the five program areas announced today
are attached.
An agency of the Commerce Department's Technology
Administration, NIST promotes U.S. economic growth by working
with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements
and standards.
- 30 -
Note to Editors: For the convenience of your readers,
references in stories to contact points for the ATP should
cite:
telephone: (800) ATP-FUND
fax: (301) 926-9524
e-mail: atp@micf.nist.gov
NOT the phone number of the media contact.
====================================================================
ATP FOCUSED PROGRAM:
Tools for DNA Diagnostics
As more and more of the human genome is mapped out and its
thousands of individual genes sequenced under the auspices of the
Human Genome Project (HGP), the commercial potential of DNA
diagnostic technologies increases. In 1997, the DNA-based portion
of the in-vitro diagnostics industry is projected to account for
roughly $500 million, up dramatically from its $58 million portion
of a $5 billion industry in 1992.
The Tools for DNA Diagnostics program, which is part of the
Advanced Technology Program, aims to accelerate the HGP payoff by
supporting development of low-cost DNA sequencing and recognition
tools and techniques that would strengthen and help create
commercial opportunities in diagnostic and therapeutic arenas. The
new program will foster development of diagnostic methods,
instrumentation, and data-handling protocols that will speed up DNA
analyses and sequence interpretation by a factor of 10 or more at
costs of about one-tenth or even one-hundredth of present costs,
which are $100 or more per test.
Meeting these goals will require the synergy of engineers,
physicists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists,
instrument designers, molecular biologists, and physicians. Among
their goals will be to develop easy-to-use methods and
miniaturized tools that can rapidly analyze minute quantities of
DNA from human patients as well as agricultural plants and
livestock. In the longer term, improved abilities to sequence and
analyze ever smaller DNA samples more quickly should increase
activity and decrease costs in settings as disparate as healthcare,
forensics, toxicology, environmental monitoring, and quality
control in the food industry.
April 1994
====================================================================
ATP FOCUSED PROGRAM:
Information Infrastructure for Healthcare
The U.S. healthcare industry has a pivotal role in the economic
health of the country. Medical spending is expected to top $1
trillion in 1994, and conservative estimates figure 20 percent of
today's healthcare costs are related to the processing of
information. The U.S. healthcare industry stands at a critical
juncture. While facing a significant increase in the number of
customers who will need to be served, the industry is being tasked
with increasing the quality of results, ensuring consistent quality
between rural and urban providers, being accountable for outcomes
on both an individual and national scale, and providing accurate
measures of success--while also lowering costs. Information
technology forms an important part of the solution.
Applying the National Information Infrastructure to healthcare is
extraordinarily simple to understand--information technology can
greatly enhance healthcare services and efficiency. Yet
implementing such an infrastructure in the real-world healthcare
environment is confounding at best. This program is designed to
help bridge the gap between the dream and reality. In an area as
complex as the nation's healthcare enterprise, diverse information
systems must be integrated in a way that helps, not hinders, the
work of individual healthcare providers. To be most effective, the
infrastructure development for information systems must be driven
by what the user needs, not by what technology is available. The
Advanced Technology Program focused program will help lay the
foundation for a healthcare information infrastructure by funding
the development of underlying infrastructural technologies, tools
to make the infrastructure efficient and user friendly, and
healthcare-specific applications. With support from major industry
efforts that have begun to address interoperability issues, ATP
funding will help drive sorely needed advances in healthcare
information systems.
Otherwise, the islands of automation that already exist in some
medical facilities will grow in isolation rather than into a
seamless, interconnected infrastructure. The enabling technologies
and coordination resulting from ATP funding can serve as the
catalyst for bringing the disparate healthcare sectors together,
ultimately providing substantial cost savings to the economy, while
also strengthening the U.S. healthcare industry and the people it
serves.
April 1994
====================================================================
ATP FOCUSED PROGRAM:
Manufacturing Composite Structures
The market potential for high-performance composites made of
polymers reinforced with high-strength glass or ceramic fibers
reaches into the tens of billions of dollars, according to those
who would make and use the materials in the automotive, civil
infrastructure, and offshore oil industries. Already for decades,
these materials have played key roles in enhancing the performance
of military aircraft and missiles. They also have had smaller niche
roles in the civil aerospace and sports equipment industries. But
they have yet to penetrate into large-scale commercial markets
because they now are too costly to manufacture and have been too
unfamiliar to designers and users.
The new Advanced Technology Program five-year focus in
Manufacturing Composite Structures aims to provide the long-term
industrial research support for the subsequent commercial
development of affordable high-quality composites into large
structures such as bridges, or manufactured products such as cars.
This program will support generic research toward cost-effective
manufacturing technologies, integration of design and simulation
methodologies, and the use of sensors for monitoring the
composite's conditions during manufacturing and during its service
lifetime. The program also will facilitate large-scale
demonstrations that will build upon the technical results of the
program and validate the cost competitiveness of the composites in
commercial sectors including land-based transportation, civil
infrastructure construction, and offshore oil drilling.
April 1994
====================================================================
ATP FOCUSED PROGRAM:
Component-Based Software
One of the many paradoxes of the Information Age is that
software -- the very essence of the automated systems that move and
process information, manage factories, maintain complex accounting
and record-keeping systems -- is produced by something much like
19th-century handcrafted products. Shrink-wrapped commodity
software for personal computers accounts for about 15 percent of
the market; the balance is made up of large, custom systems for
such things as financial services, manufacturing, or chemical
processing. These systems are custom-built monoliths, produced one
at a time at costs of up to tens of millions of dollars. The
failure rate for developing these systems -- projects that are
started but never become fully operational -- is reported to be about
70 percent.
The Advanced Technology Program focused on Component-Based Software
launches a five-year cooperative effort with U.S. software
producers to change this. Drawing on research in automated
software design and production, the program will seek to establish
the technology foundation to enable fundamental changes in the
software industry. In the long term, this program envisions that
vendors would be able to develop and market small, broadly useful
software components described by a formal specification that
characterizes the logical and functional requirements and
characteristics of each component. Buyers in turn would be able to
use similar formal specifications to characterize desired
applications, and automated systems would match components with
applications, reconfiguring the components as necessary to mesh
with the final system. Conceptually, this is like marketing a light
bulb that is automatically configured at the point of use to fit in
whatever socket is there, at whatever voltage is present. As a
result, software producers would be able to shift their emphasis
from the mechanics of the software-development process to the more
important task of meeting application needs by using automated
tools to assemble and integrate independently produced components
bought from specialized software component vendors.
While the United States clearly dominates the world software market
today, foreign competition is growing steadily, particularly in the
custom-system market directly addressed by this program. Moreover,
the combination of lower cost, higher dependability, the ability to
commercially address custom markets, and increased industry
capacity should lead to greatly expanded markets for U.S.-produced
software both at home and abroad.
The immediate business goals of the ATP program in Component-Based
Software include enabling markedly increased productivity in
software development through improved quality and reliability,
reduced development time, and systematic reuse of components;
enabling increased productivity for the users of major software
systems through increased quality and dependability of systems built
on reusable components; and extending the potential markets for
U.S. software producers. This should enable software producers
to concentrate on areas of specialization, bringing dramatic
improvements in the quality and dependability of software, and
expanding markets both at home and abroad for U.S. software.
The success of this program should have a major impact in making it
easier to produce the highly complex, integrated systems envisioned
for the National Information Infrastructure.
April 1994
====================================================================
ATP FOCUSED PROGRAM:
Computer-Integrated Manufacturing for Electronics
Electronic products--from silicon chips packed with millions of
minuscule devices to global satellite communications systems--are
essential elements of nearly every component of the commercial
landscape. An expanding international market that exceeds $700
billion attests to both their indispensability and pervasiveness.
The some 16,000 U.S. electronics firms vying in this diverse,
fiercely competitive global market employ 1.7 million people, more
workers than the next three largest manufacturing industries
combined.
Of the many determinants of competitiveness in electronics, speed
and agility are especially critical. An unabating stream of
innovations embedded in new product offerings is reducing the shelf
life of products and favoring companies that are quick to identify
market opportunities and first to develop and introduce new
products. At the same time, the costs of state-of-the-art
manufacturing capabilities are soaring A factory for making
integrated circuits, for example, now requires a $1 billion
investment.
The new Advanced Technology Program focused on Computer-Integrated
Manufacturing (CIM) for Electronics aims to foster development and
application of information technologies and systems-engineering
techniques that will enable greater manufacturing flexibility,
greater product variety, and speedier responses to market
opportunities. The technical objective is to develop a flexible
software-based framework for integrating manufacturing-production
functions.
Today's proprietary software systems are costly and take a long
time to develop and perfect. But their greatest deficiency may be
the inflexibility they impose on manufacturing operations. Changes
introduce the risk of upsetting processes, reducing output, raising
production costs, and delaying responses to market shifts.
With interoperable CIM software for production applications,
electronics firms could scale up and reconfigure their
manufacturing operations. In much the same way that personal
computer users can create their own tailor-made systems from
standard components such as disk drives, monitors, or even music
keyboards -- all made by different equipment makers -- companies
will be able to assemble and revamp their manufacturing systems
with modular hardware and software components.
A widely adopted framework for designing and implementing
interoperable software applications enables efficient
re-engineering of manufacturing operations, which can reduce
factory start-up times by 30 percent and halve the time and cost
now required to bring new electronics products to market. Even if
only 10 percent of U.S. electronics firms adopted integrated CIM
technologies, gains in sales revenues stemming from these
manufacturing improvements could total over $200 billion after
seven years. Just as critical, the framework would create a
lucrative market for independent developers of software for
integrated production applications, spurring the growth of a
supplier industry now confined to only a few general applications.
Among manufacturers and their suppliers of CIM software and other
supporting information technology products, there is no clear view
on which integration approach will dominate. ATP funding will help
industry to sharpen its focus and give it the momentum needed to
overcome technical barriers and to progress efficiently toward full
integration.
April 1994