Old or new, defense and aerospace devices as well as a growing number of commercial products are finding a home for obsolete parts. Historically, when semiconductor suppliers shifted to new technologies, they maintained their mature factories for cost-effective manufacturing of older technology. But that’s changing.
“Today, as competitors transition mature technology to newer manufacturing platforms, cost pressures are making older manufacturing facilities uncompetitive to operate,” says Len Jelinek, director and chief analyst for semiconductor manufacturing at iSuppli, a specialist in semiconductor market research.
Because of the unusually long life of major weapons platforms, such as the B-52 bomber, military and to a slightly lesser extent commercial aircraft represent the largest market for obsolete parts. It’s enough of an issue that plans are already underway for supplying parts in the distant future for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which made the inaugural test flight in its short take-off, vertical landing Lightning II variant in early April.
“The B-52 has been in service since 1955, and we’re still shipping parts for the aircraft on a weekly basis,” says Russ Johnson (Fig. 1), president of QP Semiconductor (Fig. 2), an e2v company based in Santa Clara, Calif., that focuses on extending the life of mostly existing military and aerospace electronics systems. Johnson says military and aerospace applications account for at least 90% of his company’s revenue.
Even while the Air Force works on new bombers it hopes to get into service by 2037, it intends to keep the B-52H flying until at least 2040, more than 80 years after production of the aircraft started. And by the time the F-35 gets into production, many of the parts that have been designed into it will already have generated end-of-life (EOL) notices.
“And this is supposed to be a 30- to 50-year program,” says Johnson.
TI TOPS QML LIST
Texas Instruments leads the field of all Qualified Manufacturing List (QML) part numbers (all components that are qualified by the U.S. Defense Department) listed on the Defense Supply Center, Columbus (DSCC) Web site with close to 4200 active part numbers. Johnson says QP Semiconductor is second with about 3700 part numbers.
Rochester Electronics, a distributor that stocks old parts, is another major player in the obsolescence arena. Maxim Integrated Products named it an authorized distributor for “mature” semiconductor products in April.
George Karalias, director of marketing and communications at Rochester, says his company now has a broad offering of Maxim devices, including delay devices, high-frequency waveform generators, analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), and voltage reference devices.
Lansdale Semiconductor, another major supplier of “aftermarket” ICs, offers more than 3000 different products, 850 of which are sole source. The company makes old chips under license for AMD, Fairchild, Harris, Intel, National Semiconductor, Raytheon, and Freescale Semiconductor.
Lansdale recently announced the availability of encoder/decoder pairs and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) originally designed and built by Freescale. These general-purpose building-block ICs include the MC145026, MC145027, and MC145028 encoder/decoder pairs along with the MC144110 and MC14111 DACs. The MC145026, MC145027, and MC145028 encoder/decoders are designed to be used as pairs in remote-control applications.
QP has been increasingly active in EOL programs. Its parent company, e2v, recently signed an agreement with Freescale Semiconductor to extend the useful life of 68K-series microprocessors for the military, aerospace, commercial, and industrial markets. e2v says it not only stocks the parts, it will continue to manufacture the Freescale devices for all markets following the discontinuance of the products by Freescale.
Once Freescale ceases production of the 68020, 68882, and 68C000 processors, e2v’s portfolio of high-reliability grade products will be extended with commercial-grade versions in both plastic and ceramic packages. The Freescale products will remain available from e2v for the next 10 years, or longer. In fact, Freescale has licensed e2v to deliver high-reliability versions of its products for more than 25 years.
The current arrangement allows e2v to build and sell its own products, from the 68K family to high-performance Power Architecture devices, by sourcing commercial wafers and devices from Freescale and then repackaging, screening, characterizing, and testing at extended temperatures.
In April, QP also released re-engineered versions of the QP741 and QP747 operational amplifiers, manufactured on a bipolar process to serve as drop-in replacements for the National/Fairchild LM741 used in key military/aerospace applications. (Market forecasts indicate that inventories of these military grade devices will be depleted in the near term.) Essentially, e2v is extending its product range for a wider set of applications, where system redesign is complex and expensive.