© 2019 SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only. Since 2013, a Duke University / University of Arizona collaboration has been investigating how to optimize the hardware design of aviation-security x-ray systems. The goal of the effort is to develop a detection-algorithmagnostic approach that focuses on the ability of the hardware to capture threat/non-threat information in the transduced measurements. The resulting approach combines high-fidelity, high-throughput simulation of large numbers of synthetic bags with information-theoretic based metrics and allows trade studies that vary key system hardware parameters (e.g. spectral resolution, number of views, etc.). In the intervening years, this framework has been continually expanded and side collaborations with various OEMs have been initiated to use the tool to explore areas of design space relevant to their interests. In this talk I will discuss the history of this effort as well as the current status, and will speculate on where this approach can go in the future.