Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested another US$15.50 million into future R&D of semiconductors and chips, according to a blog entry by Michael Cooney, Online News Editor for Network World.

The funds will be invested in Microelectronics Advanced Research Corp., (MARCO), a part of the Starnet program supported by DARPA and Semiconductor Research Corporation 

(SRC) that works on the development of future semiconductor technology. SRC is backed by IBM, Intel, Micron, Globalfoundries and Texas Instruments. 

In Jan. 2013, DARPA and SRC launched Starnet, and pumped five-year US$194 million fund in the research organization. The center will receive more than US$ 6 million annually for five years. MARCO is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SRC and got $13.4 million of that investment as well. 

STARnet consists of university research centers throughout U.S. including -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Notre Dame, University of California at Los Angeles and University of California at Berkeley - and others that have as their primary goal to discover "solutions to the intractable problems that are forecast to lie in the future of integrated circuit progress and to lay the foundations for microsystems innovations once the improvements associated with Moore's Law are exhausted," according to DARPA.