DARPA (via VHSIC) is the reason why most of the commercial VLSI tools even exist today.

That's why it was particularly frustrating to see DARPA missing the boat to try to make more digital stuff happen. We have an excess of digital. We have vast quantities of digital. We have so much digital people don't know what to do with it all.

What we don't have vast quantities of are interesting sensors, oddball RF designs, or extremely low power things. Note that these are all analog.

Throwing money into an open-source VLSI toolchain would do more to relieve DARPA's VLSI bottlenecks than anything else they could do.

Not sure what you are referring to, but the majority of DARPA’s recent $110M investment in silicon design tools and opens source IP is dedicated to analog design.