AT Power Solutions Capacitive Fabric

The United States has invested hundreds of billions of dollars to acquire the most technologically advanced military in history to provide its soldiers with a battlefield advantage. The protection of these sophisticated weapons systems and their electronics is critical for the continued maintenance of our technological warfare edge. While anti-tamper development efforts are underway, a significant obstacle to the development of an effective anti-tamper solution has been the problem of powering the anti-tamper system since the reverse engineering process necessitates the isolation of the electronic component under investigation. The goal of this project is the development of a capacitive fabric that can detect reverse engineering intrusions and harvest the energy produced by the reverse engineering intrusion to power a penalty response. In Phase I of this project, a microstructured capacitive fabric that detects interrogation attacks through a change in the capacitance of the fabric will be developed, applied to a piezoelectric film that harvests power from interrogations, coupled to signal discrimination circuitry, and demonstrated to detect physical intrusions. During Phase II, the capacitive detector system will be developed into a prototype demonstration device that meets or exceeds the criteria established in this request.