Washington: The microelectronics industry is at an “inflection point, and the US government must implement policies to entice companies to do more manufacturing within American shores, the Department of Defense’s chief weapons buyer said.
Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said on a webinar that her office is taking a look at how to entice companies to bring microelectronic production and testing work back to the United States, where the Defense Department can more easily verify the security and reliability of the hardware.
Microelectronics are the cornerstone to advancing emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing and 5G wireless networks, as well as critical components of weapons systems. But the Pentagon is concerned that the current market — where the majority of production and testing takes place outside the United States — allows for adversaries such as China to introduce backdoors that will harm US national security.
“We can no longer identify the pedigree of our microelectronics,” Lord said at the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative summit. “Therefore we can no longer ensure that backdoors, malicious code or data exfiltration commands aren’t embedded in our code.
While we develop the ability to identify the technical path to ensure all components, circuits and systems are clean regardless of their manufacturing location, we need to find a path to domestic sources to provide a secure and resilient supply of legacy, state-of-the-present and state-of-the-art microelectronics.”
