New Process for Space Qualified Electronic Components

The Navy is looking to increase the availability of space grade components, such as resistors, which are sometimes single sourced. While DoD originally was the driver for and major customer of electronics components in the 1960s, today the total DoD usage of electronics components is now lest than 1%. These economic realities have caused a current situation in which space programs have a limited and diminishing supplier base. Coupled with the stringent screening, qualification, documentation, and oversight of agencies such as DSCC, many commercial component suppliers have exited the DoD business as seen in Figure 1. This dependency on few suppliers is a well known problem and is highly undesirable. The purpose of this work is to provide a novel material and process set to provide a practical way to supply space qualified electronic components. Space Micro, as a developer and manufacturer of space qualified boards and subsystems, is acutely aware of the sourcing issues and challenges for space qualified components, ranging from rad hard microcircuits down to the passive parts e.g. (resistors and capacitors) cited in this solicitation. This work will focus on making a MIL-PRF-55182/6 resistor to demonstrate and proove out the approach, through reliability and ultimately flight testing.