U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command - Chemical Biological Center (CCDC CBC), Rock Island, IL, on behalf of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Policy via its Manufacturing Resiliency and Assurance Office, and Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment Program (10 U.S.C. § 2508), in conjunction with Army Contracting Command - Rock Island (ACC-RI), manages the Cornerstone Other Transaction Agreement (OTA), in accordance with 10 U.S.C. § 2371b. Cornerstone was architected to create a broad-based, flexible and enduring public-private consortium focused on strategic strengthening of the U.S. Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and provides a strong complement to the mandates in Presidential Executive Order 13806.

ACC-RI, on behalf of CCDC CBC and the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Research and Engineering (DASD(R&E)), intends to issue a competitive Cornerstone Initiative Request (CIR) for 5G Communication Envelope Tracking (ComET), on or after 8 July 2019, with an estimated closing date of 10 days after issuance. The CIR for 5G ComET will be restricted to Cornerstone consortium members.

The CIR will solicit enhanced whitepapers for one or more firm-fixed-price prototype OTAs with incremental payments made upon completion of specific milestones. The government reserves the right to award OTA(s) in the best interest of the government, to include re-competing the requirement if needed. The Base Period of Performance will be 18 months with options up to an additional 60 months. Upon successful completion of each prototype, a follow-on production contract may be awarded.

The DoD requires advanced, envelope tracking power supplies which enable the wider bandwidths, higher Peak-to-Average-Power-Ratios, higher frequencies, and evolving signals necessitated by 5G communication applications. Current power electronics systems available to the Government often lag many generations behind that of commercial-off-the-shelf devices. This significant gap in the Defense Industrial Base translates into a performance gap between the capability of fielded hardware and commercial hardware. To help bridge this gap, the DoD is interested in prototype power electronics systems which implement modern topologies and recent advances in wide bandgap (WBG) technologies to incrementally enhance system-level performance and Size, Weight, Power, & Cost (SWAP-C) across the frequency spectrum for 5G communication applications.

The objective of this effort is to prototype various Radio Frequency (RF) Transmit & Receive Modules (TRXMs) which implement envelope tracking techniques to improve SWAP-C and performance over state-of-the-art. This includes maturing L-Band, S- and/or C-Band, and X-Band RF TRXMs of this nature from Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 3 or 4 to TRL 7.

The CIR for 5G ComET will be communicated to the Cornerstone consortium and companies with pending applications via email. Interested organizations are required to have begun the membership process for their proposal to be reviewed. Entities must be members of the Cornerstone consortium, with a signed Cornerstone Consortium Management Agreement, to be awarded this OTA task. Contractors may obtain Cornerstone registration information by visiting the Cornerstone website:

http://ibasp-public.ria.army.mil/cornerstone/

Interested parties should stay alert for any changes that may be published to this FBO posting. Please email all questions and responses to the following mailbox:

[email protected]

This Special Notice is for planning purposes only and does not constitute a CIR or an obligation on behalf of the U.S. Government. Issuance of this Special Notice is not a guarantee of a future CIR or an award and is not a commitment of any kind by the Government.