Yet another Aviation Week article on the dangers of counterfeit chips finding their way into US systems such as THAADS anti missile, C-130J transport, Apache and Chinook helicopters. The article goes on to scary speculation with counterfeit chips might have concealed backdoors allowing an enemy to disable US weapons systems in time of war thru a sneaky internet attack.
This is largely a self inflicted wound. The military wants to approve each semiconductor device that goes into a weapons system. They take so long to approve a device that it is out of production by the time the Pentagon finishes doing the paperwork. Since the makers can not obtain approved MIL SPEC devices from the OEM manufacturer, instead they deal with a world full of shady wholesalers/distributers, who for a price, will offer any old MIL SPEC chip you might need. And the wholesalers/disti's will find the needed chips anywhere.
The solution is to require defense contractors to use current production commercial chips from reputable US makers. A box of commercial grade chips shipped from the likes of Intel, Analog Devices, Texas Instrument, Micron, Xylinx or Altera will be what the maker says they are. A shipment of chips from Midnight Semiconductor Supply might be damn near anything , from damn near anywhere.
Current production commercial chips are 10 to 100 times more reliable than any kind of MIL SPEC device. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Built a brassboard system with commercial devices, it worked fine. Built the deliverable system with MIL-SPEC devices which were terrible. A couple of dead devices in every box. Electrical performance so low that we had to redesign circuits that worked fine with decent commercial devices to work with the cruddy MIL-SPEC devices.
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