Commercial component integration plan for military equipment programs: reliability prediction and part procurement

Due to the military's loss of influence in the microcircuit industry, resulting in drastically diminishing military component resources, the application of plastic encapsulated microcircuits (PEMs) into Lockheed Martin, GES Naval Sheltered equipment (LM-GES) has become inevitable. The commercial industry's experience with PEMs and numerous studies, summarized in this paper, conclude that the quality and reliability of PEMs can be comparable to their military hermetic counterparts in a Naval Sheltered environment. LM-GES equipment experience for hermetic parts and the commercial industry's available data for PEMs is presented showing that the quality and reliability of microcircuits, hermetics and PEMs, has significantly improved. However, the current reliability prediction methods of MIL-HDBK-217 are lagging behind today's observed microcircuit quality levels.