Hundreds of engineers gathered at the Darpa Electronics Resurgence Initiative Summit in San Francisco yesterday to hear that dozens of them were getting millions (one group was awarded more than $60 million) to tackle some big questions. If researchers can answer them in the affirmative, they will keep electronics going long after Moore’s Law is a thing of the past. And in the process they’ll likely change the nature of the industry as well as the jobs of engineers.

The Electronics Resurgence Initiative has three main thrusts: design, architecture, and materials & integration. (For a deep dive into the the programs and the reasoning behind them see last week’s interview with the initiative’s leader, Bill Chappell.)