COTS History

About twenty years ago the Department of Defense and Congress began a movement which caused major semiconductor memory suppliers to discard/discontinue their support of the military market needs for Mil-Spec memory products, specifically Federal Acquisition Regulation 12. Which, basically stated “everyday off-the-shelf items can be bought with no DSCC Standard Microcircuit Drawing (SMD) specification and a minimum of oversite.”

Recently Sen. John McCain asked “Why are billion dollar Future Combat Systems, the biggest, most expensive modernization program in the history of the U.S. Army being bought like thousand dollar PC’s?” His point being that applying FAR 12 to Future Combat Systems, or FCS, a program which encompasses everything from fleets of new robotic vehicles to a whole new architecture for battlefield communications for our troops is not correct. And recently, FCS has been re-categorized to disallow FAR 12 and COTS, opening opportunities for DCSS SMD applications: Fully qualified, -55C to +125C, hermetically sealed packages.

This attempt to keep costs under control, COTS, commercial off-the-shelf products was forced upon the market as a way of making available the latest memory technologies to the military market. COTS was perceived as a cost savings, but few users of the products understood the actual cost of COTS especially in mission critical applications. Today it is estimated that COTS is acceptable for less than 70% of the intended applications. COTS fall short in applications that require full operation over extreme temperature (-55C to +125C) ranges and extreme humidity levels (hermetic packages).

FAR 12 (COTS) lead to the proliferation of third-party packaging and test companies to build and test packaged products to customer specific sourced controlled drawings SCD). Since no one SCD was exactly the same for every user this became a yet another high cost solution to the problem. In order to compensate for the short-fall in guaranteeing high-reliability in commercial plastic packaged parts end-users have once again retreated to creating source control documents that in most cases require destructive testing such as HAST or other methods of extreme testing to insure the reliability of the devices to be used. Inspection and tests will likely detect defects, but devices with subtle internal cracks might pass electrical tests and later cause field failures. And that is where we are today, with DSCC beginning to issue families of Standard Microcircuit Drawings (SMDs) to cover memory devices for critical military applications and major programs being categorized other than FAR 12 compatible.