nothing wrong with this. Government pays for the product. The product should be serviceable whether the company becomes defunct or business shifts. At this point, military or consumer should be able to give blueprints of the parts to different manufacturer or manufacturer it themselves.
There are three things that already exist and address these kinds of concerns (I've removed some, but not all, color commentary, this is somewhat effective but definitely not 100%):
Data Rights - Every acquisitions contract includes data rights. The specific data varies by contract. For things like an LRU, the data rights may include schematics. This is, in theory, enough information to recreate the device but may leave out certain key proprietary pieces. Like if a 1980s era LRU had an M68k, no schematics from Motorola will be included. But the architecture is known so recreation is technically feasible. The schematics also offer a foundation for producing a like-product replacing the obsolete components, though a project like that can take years.
ICD - Interface Control Document. The device itself becomes a blackbox. Instead a description is provided, along with other requirements and spec documents, on how it behaves. The good ICDs are really enough to start a clean room project without ever needing to crack open the to-be-replaced devices. Unfortunately the good ones are rare, they often stop getting updated at some point and modern ICDs are shit compared to the documentation from last century.
COTS - DOD (and the US gov't in general) has had a major 30+ year push to go COTS as much as possible. Obviously this doesn't work for everything, but go back to that M68k example. There's no reason to ask for a custom chip when a COTS one will do. Same for other parts of major systems. Computer motherboards can be COTS (or very near) even if the chassis is bespoke to make it form and fit suitable for its intended environment. COTS, in theory, also makes it possible to do incremental refreshes more easily. Like replace that computer hardware in the custom chassis every 5 years, it's not trivial but it's a small jump and updating software components in such "short" (by DOD standards) increments is hardly onerous. In practice, updates may not happen for 20+ years which is a more substantial undertaking.
These, and other things that are supposed to be done in acquisitions, largely resolve the "What will we do in 20 years when the supplier has gone under" questions.
It's so sad to see how miserable ICDs have gotten. Some of them are just REST APIs and you are on your own to figure out what everything means, it's pathetic. The old ones, you can (and I have) interfaced with stuff from the 80s without any customer input.
(alright, it has happened though that they needed to wheel out the old-timer who was around when the hardware was originally delivered, come integration time - since the way you hook up to the thing isn't always clearly described. But the software was fine!)
Yep. The older the ICD, the better it seems to be. I miss the era of dedicated technical writers, too. We received an "ICD" from a vendor and it's just garbage. It's incomplete, for one, and kind of just ends in the middle of things and leaves out crucial details so we can't use it without reverse engineering their system. A major problem is that it appears their developers are their document writers now, and they just don't do it, either out of laziness or insufficient time (higher priority dev tasks in the queue). They've been publishing the same incomplete document for years.
Wafers come in batch sizes of a FOUP, these are the little sealed boxes you see the robots on the tracks moving around a semiconductor factory. One might only need one wafer of chips or less for a project, those other unused wafers go in storage after some testing. When the military needs spare parts, those wafers can be brought out of storage and diced and packaged (if we will even still do that in the future).
This technique is already done for things with long operational lifetimes. It would be nice if we made a distributed (geographically) wafer bank so that we will have a long supply of semiconductors, esp after a civilization scale catastrophe.
Interesting. But why store the somewhat unwieldy wafer instead the packaged chip? I’d imagine that doesn’t add much cost but makes storage significantly simpler.
The analogy of a wafer bank to a seed bank is new to me. I would imagine the wafer bank is a bad idea, because they would just be playbooks that would lead to the collapse. So kinda pointless.
nothing wrong with this. Government pays for the product. The product should be serviceable whether the company becomes defunct or business shifts. At this point, military or consumer should be able to give blueprints of the parts to different manufacturer or manufacturer it themselves.