Summer Myatt
The United States is in the midst of a microelectronics dilemma. Demand for semiconductor chips has skyrocketed but supply chain problems have created a drastic decline in chip manufacturing, sparking a national security issue for the U.S.
“Semiconductors are essential to national security,” according to a White House supply chain report. These chips are at the center of virtually every technological advancement the U.S. is pursuing today. Everything including military systems, advanced weapons, hypersonics, directed energy, communications, autonomous systems, AI, 5G and much more are dependent on semiconductor technology.
Echoing the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, Dr. Devanand Shenoy, principal director of microelectronics for the DOD’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, said, “Semiconductors are key to the must-win technologies of the future.”
In the past couple of years, however, the global supply chain has taken a devastating hit. In February 2021, the lead time — or the duration of time between when a semiconductor chip is ordered and when that order gets fulfilled — reached a record-breaking 15 weeks, and manufacturing sources have continued to dwindle.
Now, the federal government is focusing heavily on ramping up its domestic semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, developing a robust workforce and speeding innovation pipelines to avoid being outpaced by adversaries.
During the Microelectronics Forum, hosted by ExecutiveBiz Events, Dr. Shenoy asserted that we have to increase our discovery and innovation of microelectronics technologies while securing the supply chain if we are to meet the urgent national security needs of today and prepare for those of the future.
“We want to ensure the multi-vendor assured pipeline of critical microelectronics across several generations of technologies in a diminishing global supply chain,” Dr. Shenoy said, underscoring the importance of industry partnerships and increased production capacity.
Today, the DOD is conducting multiple efforts to ensure this pipeline. The Defense Microelectronics Cross Functional Team, which Dr. Shenoy directs, was established to provide more cohesion and unity to the DOD’s myriad of microelectronics efforts.
The CFT, Dr. Shenoy explained, aims to “provide a front door organization to augment the decentralized execution that currently exists across multiple agencies, offices and organizations when it comes to microelectronics.”
The Defense Department is also getting serious about its longstanding supply chain visibility challenges in its efforts to speed microelectronics innovation.
“For many years, the department has been trying to develop tools and capabilities to have visibility into the supply chain from the highest levels to the sub tiers of the supply chain,” he said. “Until there is greater visibility, it will be difficult to identify certain supply chain threats, vulnerabilities and risks.”
The DOD is developing a tool called AMARO, or Automated Microelectronics Analysis and Reporting Optimization, to ease some of these visibility issues and provide better supply chain insights.
Dr. Shenoy said AMARO can “map the microelectronic lifecycle across the entirety of its supply chain and identify possible threats and vulnerabilities, and can assess across a bill of materials.” But the applications of tools like AMARO extend even past microelectronics and can be used in the future to model and predict important outcomes for broader DOD needs.
These tools can help senior decision makers “answer strategic questions such as, ‘What’s the impact to the DOD if country X were to invade country Y?’ and, ‘What if there is a natural disaster?’ You know, ‘What if a particular supplier in a supply chain were to be unable to supply critical parts in that ecosystem?’” Dr. Shenoy explained.
Being able to answer these questions faster is critical to the assurance of supply chains across many different sectors, he added.
The Microelectronics Forum is part of ExecutiveBiz Events’ series focused on the DOD’s critical and emerging technologies list. Join us on July 12 for our next event in the series, the Hypersonics Forum.
Michael White, principal director of hypersonics for OUSD R&E, is scheduled to keynote. Register here.
