Modernizing Defense Microelectronics: Challenges and Opportunities
To learn more, download Modernizing Defense Microelectronics: Challenges and Opportunities here.
ETI released a podcast about the paper that can be found here.
The Department of Defense (DoD) is tasked with fielding military systems that meet America’s national security needs. To do so, it constantly strives to strike a balance between fielding new capabilities while upgrading existing ones to provide the military with improved performance to keep pace with changing threats, or to integrate innovations generated by the private sector. However, the current state of defense microelectronics poses a significant challenge to modernizing defense systems efficiently in terms of cost, schedule, and distance from the microelectronics state of the practice on a variety of performance metrics.
Such modernization upgrades must enhance mission capabilities, which may involve leveraging advanced microelectronics to reduce size, weight, and power (SWAP) while simultaneously boosting computational performance and speed. Effectively managing national security risks, tackling supply chain complexities, and addressing manufacturing and workforce requirements are all essential components of this endeavor. Achieving success necessitates close collaboration among various stakeholders within the DoD, scientific, and technological communities (including universities and federal research organizations), the defense industrial base, and the global commercial microelectronics sector.
To address these issues, the National Defense Industrial Association's (NDIA) Emerging Technologies Institute (ETI) convened a workshop on microelectronics modernization and conducted a series of research activities in support of this report. ETI conducted interviews with a host of subject matter experts with backgrounds ranging from a lifetime of service at the DoD, to commercial microelectronics industry veterans, to defense industrial base engineers and business executives.
ETI hopes that this report’s findings and recommendations foster a robust and constructive dialogue among stakeholders across the defense industrial base, the commercial microelectronics industry, academia, and the Department of Defense.
