Eric Tegler
Supply chain stories aren’t sexy. Maybe that’s why the dangerously fragile, technologically lagging American defense electronics supply chain isn’t registering on the national security risk meter. But it should. The U.S. is facing shortages and security vulnerabilities with printed circuit boards and integrated circuit substrates crucial to the sexiest weapons systems we have.
Over the last year, the global semiconductor shortage has received manifold attention but the broader U.S. electronics supply chain has been almost completely ignored.
“When we say that the problem is urgent we really mean it. It’s falling on deaf ears,” says Todd Brassard, chief operating officer of Calumet Electronics, a Michigan-based printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturer.
Calumet, which with a workforce of 300 makes high-reliability circuit boards for aerospace and defense, industrial controls, utilities, and medical sectors, typifies the small firms that make up a critical link in the supply of defense electronics. The kind of PCBs and IC substrates it turns out are the base hardware in every American weapons/ISR system.
But Calumet is a survivor in an ecosystem that has shrunken due to inattention and mistaken industrial policy, according to Brassard, who says there was an 80% contraction in the U.S. PCB sector from 2000 to 2015.
“From ten billion dollars to two billion dollars, from 2,500 PCB manufacturers to 145 in 2018. It’s not just the loss of that capacity, it’s failure to maintain state-of-the-art.”
The contraction is partly the product of commercial forces propelling the general off-shoring of American manufacturing. It’s also the product of over two decades of government policy and cultural drift which defined the U.S. as a “post-industrial” information-centric economy and society. That society - tech culture and government policy declared - no longer needed to manufacture.
“The U.S. wants to be able to have unrivaled electronics systems, not just to design them,” Brassard observes. “We can design them in America. What we can’t do is build everything in America. We’ve spent the last 20 years educating other countries in how to build the products we need. Now they’re starting to exceed [U.S. capability].”
Farming out electronics manufacturing has yielded a lack of capacity, unreliable materials sourcing, the twin dangers of defense electronics hardware hacking and sabotage by U.S. adversaries, and led to a failure to keep pace technologically. These were avoidable dangers.
Boards, Connectors & Counterfeit
In 2016, the U.S. Air Force identified avionics in 50 weapons systems — from satellites to the F-35 — with embedded hardware vulnerabilities. The risk of such vulnerability in USAF and other service weapons systems has long been quietly acknowledged, inspiring the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s 2010 Clean-Slate Re-design of Adaptive, Secure Hosts (CRASH) program among others.
Public acknowledgement and attention has not generally been forthcoming. However, the Covid-19 experience has brought some defense electronics issues to the surface.
The PCBetter Act, introduced in April by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., would require defense contractors to tell the Pentagon if China, Russia, Iran and North Korea made any of the printed circuit boards in systems they were supplying. Hawley noted that “Chinese printed circuit boards pose a serious threat to the integrity of America’s defense systems.”
Thus far, the bill has only been referred to the Committee on Armed Services.
Chris Peters, executive director of the U.S. Partnership for Assured Electronics (USPAE), has been trying to spotlight the supply issue, recently penning an article on the subject.
The electronics supply chain, he says, starts with the raw materials needed to make and assemble a printed circuit board and the many components mounted on that board. They range from specialized metals, plastics and glasses to resins and films. Components include resistors, capacitors, inductors, interconnects, memory, integrated circuits and more.
Many are difficult or impossible to source from U.S. suppliers. PCB manufacturers are buried deep in the electronics supply chain, so U.S. government agencies have very little visibility into where the raw materials originate and what risks they may entail.
Peters notes that semiconductor makers are typically large companies with layers of security but small PCB manufacturers don’t have such layered protection.
“Which part of the supply chain would you expect to be more vulnerable?”
The few remaining U.S. PCB and substrate makers not only have difficulty sourcing raw materials, the components they install on circuit boards can be compromised by cyber exploits or reverse engineering.
Peters characterizes what China and others are doing in this realm as “pretty scary,” noting malicious tampering/insertion of compromised components on assembled circuit boards capable of trojan attacks.
Reports from the University of Florida stretching back a decade detail potential exploits as does a recent article in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ magazine laying out “Three Ways To Hack a Printed Circuit Board.”
There are also thousands of different types of PCB connectors, many of which cannot be bought in the U.S., Peters adds. That makes DoD reliant on foreign suppliers including China. Likewise, capacitors can be difficult to source in the U.S. - one of the reasons they are the second-most counterfeited electronic component.
And yet, there has been little concrete action taken to address these vulnerabilities. In March, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich) took leadership of a bipartisan Defense Critical Supply Chain Task Force alongside Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher within the House Armed Services Committee. Last week, the pair held a conference discussing their findings at George Mason University. Their presentation was focused on microchips, Peters says.
“But nothing was mentioned about the rest of the electronics ecosystem. The PCB manufacturers, assemblers and everyone else have to be able to get supplies. Otherwise, you have supply chain disruption even if you have the chips.”
USPAE has been working with one of the few official organizations stood up to address defense electronic supply chain issues - the DoD Executive Agent for Printed Circuit Board and Interconnected Technology, established in 2016 under the auspices of the Navy’s Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division.
The Board is developing acquisition guidance for DoD engineers and acquisition professionals to help them better source PCBs and components from a trusted supply chain.
Lagging Tech & Workforce
While better guidance would be helpful, only more investment in PCB manufacturing technology and a skilled workforce can tip the balance of electronics leadership and security back in America’s favor.
Another issue facing the rump defense electronics sector is a growing gap in advanced manufacturing capabilities. Peters points out that as more computing power is packaged into smaller form factors, the “traces and spaces” on circuit boards need to be tinier as well, while maintaining flawless reliability.
Leading Asian and European manufacturers are meeting this need using additive technology (like 3D printing) to produce traces of just 30 microns, and are aiming to reach just 7-15 microns within a few years. America’s PCB makers largely still use “subtractive” technology (masking and etching) to produce PCBs with metallic traces and spaces 75 microns wide.
Industry experts reckon the United States is lagging a decade behind in developing and adopting such advanced electronics packaging capabilities. USPAE blames thin industry profit margins and insufficient federal funding for the paucity of research and development in this area.
The result is increasingly a situation in which U.S.-produced chips and bare boards are shipped to other countries for packaging into advanced PCBs. Those modules are shipped to third countries for final assembly into products. It’s a recipe for malicious tampering and targeted economic pressure.
Calumet, Brassard says, has been working on developing additive processing with other companies for two years and is now in the commercialization stage.
The pressure to find people in the U.S. who can build and assemble custom, low-volume defense electronics is a problem too. USPAE is trying call attention to the importance of trade schools and trade education to help ease the workforce crunch. Peters says his corporate members recognize that training a skilled workforce applies to manufacturing “across the board, not just to electronics.”
“We need technicians, we need operators,” USPAE’s executive director adds. “There are a lot of opportunities to earn really good money without the debt you’d have from college and to be able to start working quickly.”
But with such people in short supply, reinvigorating the electronics base can not go forward fully.
“If we start to try to bring all of this work back to the U.S., we’re out of luck,” Peters observes.
Todd Brassard says it’s Calumet’s good fortune that Michigan Technological University is 12 miles down road from his firm, providing a supply of qualified engineers and designers. But finding the people to build, to execute that design and engineering is a challenge. He laments the message that America has sent to its young people; that manufacturing is going away.
World circumstances are changing that and manufacturing jobs are indeed returning to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and elsewhere.
“We need to stop saying that we have jobs and start saying that we have careers,” Brassard opines.
One way to buttress career paths in the defense electronics business would be to launch new, affordable credentialing and certification standards, giving individuals at manufacturing levels from entry to senior craftsmen marketable, recognized skill sets.
“When you come to us, we’re going to teach you on the job,” Brassard explains. “You won’t be limited to staying at our company. We’d like you to choose to stay with us but you’ll have forward mobility within the [defense electronics] industry period.”
Calumet is one of the first three PCB makers to attain the new IPC 1791 Trusted Electronic Designer, Fabricator and Assembler certification granted by the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division.
The certification, which assures ITAR compliance among other requirements, is now getting traction, signaling that Calumet and other certified firms have gone from being “commodity companies” to tip-of-the-spear defense electronics producers in technology and capability terms.
These are promising seeds but accelerating growth from them will require public awareness, industry investment and federal help. Advanced IC substrates and PCBs “must” be considered part of defense microelectronics ecosystem Brassard stresses. The moment that happens he affirms, there will be funding opportunities for the small core of companies that manufacture these foundational components.
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