DARPA does have some interesting VLSI projects running currently. Some of the ones I've noticed are:

Chiplets: https://www.darpa.mil/program/common-heterogeneous-integrati...

PIPES - optical chip io : https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2020-03-16

Automated ML chip generation: https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/Real%20Time%20Machine%20Le...