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