Trustworthy Tech: Air Force Research Lab Looking at Uncertainties with Electronics.

• Author: Heckmann, Laura

SAN ANTONIO, Texas --The war in Ukraine shows that the present and future of conflict will involve contested environments, requiring complex and resilient electronic devices and systems. The Air Force Research Laboratory wants to ensure these technologies can not only be produced, but trusted.

"You hear a lot about cyber warfare as a new warfighting domain, information operations and things like that," said Yadunath Zambre, chief microelectronics technology officer for the Air Force Research Laboratory, speaking recently at the National Defense Industrial Association's Science and Engineering Technology conference. "Fundamental to that is the electronics that's in all of our systems."

The Air Force Research Lab is focused on ensuring visibility through all phases of electronics production. "How do we know we can actually get access to the supply of electronics we need?" Zambre said. "And how do we know that we can actually trust it? If you can't do that, we've got issues."

Often, the Defense Department needs highly specialized electrical components and in small quantities, which means there is a limited supplier base. Then, there are high-value platforms that need sense-making capabilities that use larger node sizes, he added. "You just need bigger stuff than what is commercially available.

Add to that environmental requirements and other constraints on what the department can and can't use, and the universe of potential suppliers shrinks further, he added.

Even within the small universe, however, it's easy to lose sight of what's taking place in the manufacturing process. Designing and packaging chips is complicated by multiple stages of production at different locations, and there are many parts with no commonality--"performing the same function, but there are maybe 50 or 60 different implementations across different programs," he said.

The Defense Department needs to aggregate, but they also "need to partner with a set of organizations we can trust," he said. "[So we] have some assurance of what's actually in the design, and what's actually being produced."

Vulnerabilities exist at each stage of microelectronics production, from the physical manufacturing to the classified data and specifications, he said.

"I want to make sure that there's no way anybody is going to exfiltrate that design so that the adversary can take advantage of it, and there's no way for them to compromise the design," he said.

Much of the risk lies not in the...