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.

Return to Press Release - April 1994

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.

Return to Press Release - April 1994

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.

Return to Press Release - April 1994

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.

Return to Press Release - April 1994

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.

Return to Press Release - April 1994