What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project MSL-02 of PE 0602025E. This is the budget justification's own description of work that has not happened yet — the one thing no other level of the budget carries.
- Initiate design of circuits and modules for very large-scale photonic integration. - Initiate design of advanced concepts for flexible batteries and energy storage devices. - Perform design and assessment of precision, maskless nanofabrication tools. - Initiate preliminary design of atomically precise molecular machines with initial circuit demonstration. - Create underlying architecture for design tools and flexible assembly technologies for use in creating useful microsystems modules by reusing chips from commonly available electronics. - Initiate design of circuits for most promising unconventional compute paradigms.
The FY 2027 increase reflects studies and concepts initiations including, but not limited to, applied research in the design and manufacturability of photonic-electronic components and new technologies that enable rapid commercial scaling of advanced microsystems.
FY2026: the year under way
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
- Develop methodology for very large-scale photonic integration. - Perform evaluation of advanced concepts for flexible batteries and energy storage devices. - Evaluate technologies for precision, maskless nanofabrication tools. - Identify exemplars and evaluate technology for atomically precise molecular machines. - Evaluate design tools and flexible assembly technologies for use in creating useful microsystems modules by reusing chips from commonly available electronics. - Conduct a study of the various unconventional compute paradigms and identify areas of investment in probabilistic, optical and biological compute.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | Enacted | 32.4 |
| FY2027 | Request | 45.6 |
This activity is 12% of project MSL-02's FY2027 request and 2.8% of PE 0602025E's. In the request year the activities under a project sum to it exactly; in the current year they under-cover it in about 9% of cases, so an activity's delta can legitimately exceed its parent's and the two must not be compared row to row.
29 activities in project MSL-02
Every R-2A line of this project, largest FY2027 request first. Linked where the activity has enough of its own narrative to carry a page; the rest are shown in full on the project page.