NASA Feedback to DLA Land & Maritime Moratorium on Wafer Fab Audits
On September 29, 2017 the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), Land and Maritime, announced that on September 1, 2017 they had begun a moratorium on the auditing of wafer fabrication facilities (fabs) used in the production of semiconductor die for military (MIL) qualified integrated circuits and discrete semiconductors (transistors and diodes). The announcement said the moratorium would last for six months initially and would apply to all wafer fabs qualified to MIL-PRF-19500 (discretes) and MIL-PRF-38535 (ICs) located, onshore or offshore. The stated rationale behind this action was to give DLA time to evaluate the risk of modifying current surveillance practices across 70+ Federal Stock Classes (FSC) under the jurisdiction of the DLA Qualifying Activity (VQ). The objective was to free up the resources used in these audits so they could be redirected towards audits of other commodities which were under resourced, notably connectors. In the announcement letter, DLA-VQ requested data from the community to assist with decisions on wafer fab re-audit cycle modifications. NASA used available information on current and historical audit schedules to gather such data and analyzed it to provide an in-depth understanding of the impact of locations, part types, in-house or out-of-house fabs on those schedules over time. This presentation provides the results of NASA's data analysis and suggest some changes to auditing practices that could increase efficient use of resources without significant increases in risk.