Defense spending up, but many parts are commercial: Dedicated military parts often missing in action

Electronic News, March 11, 2002 by Ed Sperling, Bernard Levine

The defense budget is going up, but interest in building componentry and other products solely for the U.S. government is going down, way down.

At a time when the whole electronics industry is digging out from one of the worst slumps in history, this may seem counterintuitive. But given the low volumes sold to the U.S. government, not to mention the massive bureaucracy, vendors of embedded systems, components and other hardware and software say the economics often don't work in their favor.

The government seems to have gotten that message loud and clear. The focus in the defense establishment now is heavily on buying commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts or customizing off-the-shelf products with higher temperature packages or ruggedizing the assembly process, rather than relying on parts specially built to military specifications.

"The problem with selling to the military is that it's done in such low volumes," said Peter Schulmeyer, director of strategic marketing for Motorola's transportation group. "That's why they reuse standard products."

Some veteran passives, connectors and semiconductors are still widely made in dedicated military grades, but newer integrated circuitry is much harder to find in fully mil-spec versions.

"You can't get a Pentium that's a mil version," said Leon Hamiter, president of the Components Technology Institute, which puts on the Commercialization of Military and Space Electronics Conference as well as the Capacitor and Resistor Technology Symposium.

"Many manufacturers of logic chips won't sell mil versions, but you can buy commercial versions and go to a packaging house that will militarize it with an hermetic and higher temperature package," Hamiter said.

Many semiconductor and passive parts built to military-drawn specifications were widely available during the massive defense buildups in the '60s, '70s and '80s but have become scarcer since the Pentagon cutbacks that followed the Reagan years.

"There is not as broad a base of military products as there used to be," said Ben Schwartz, VP of strategic marketing at distributor Jaco Electronics Inc. "Many military contractors today will buy industrial or commercial temperature parts and test a fully loaded system. And if somebody is building a helicopter or aircraft system, there are radios or instrument controls or other things where you don't need full mil-spec parts."

And there often are price and other advantages to using commercial parts that are built in much higher volumes.

"Once the government determined the reliability of industrial and commercial grade products was as good if not better than the military parts available years ago, they migrated to what was available. You don't have to write enormous specifications for each part, avoiding a lot of paperwork," Schwartz said.

But Hamiter notes that dedicated mil parts--if you can find them--sometimes have an overall price edge. "In many cases, the cost to prove or test a commercial part would exceed the cost of a mil part, if available."

Often the military part just isn't available. "I don't think you will find a whole lot of new semiconductor designs using mil parts," Hamiter added. "There are not a lot of new items being introduced as mil parts. More advanced ICs are not going there."

Increased defense spending could eventually "create some turnaround in the amount of dedicated military parts and subsystems, but it is too early to judge," he said.

What do prime defense and space contractors and their subcontractors do in the meantime? "People are buying commercial components and testing them to see if they are acceptable for military use, or buying board- or system-level products and testing there. Commercial parts often are OK, especially in less critical systems, and if not OK, they often can be temperature or radiation-hardened with some extra work," Hamiter said.

"The biggest problem may be where the military doesn't want to change an old design but needs to replenish products, such as now with smart bombs," he said.