In IFTLE 541 I mentioned funding from the government organization known as the Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment Program (IBAS). I got offline questions about who they were and what they were doing. Since their latest program is now public, I can give you a little more information.
IBAS
IBAS is dedicated to ensuring that the Department of Defense (DoD) is positioned to effectively address industrial base issues and support the National Security Innovation Base. IBAS leverages several contracting authorities and has invested more than $300 million directly into the industrial base from 2019 – 2021.
Since 2019, through its National Imperative for Industrial Skills initiative, the IBAS program has partnered with industry and academia and invested over $80 million in industrial workforce development and training projects to help improve or scale workforce pipelines supporting a variety of defense weapon system development, production, and sustainment needs, with a focus on skills such as welding, advanced machining, electronics, precision optics, metrology, digital/additive manufacturing, and other emerging Industry 4.0 skills.
By investing in the areas mentioned above and building partnerships with industry and the Interagency, the IBAS program strives to keep the U.S. industrial base at the front of strategic competitiveness by fielding new technologies and systems with the right sized and trained workforce. The IBAS program, directed in Title 10 USC Section 2508, is one of the key analysis and investment tools of the Industrial Policy office.
IBAS Cornerstone
Cornerstone is a prototype Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) contract vehicle and consortium supporting a broad spectrum of DoD technology areas to strengthen the force posture of the Defense Industrial Base (DIB). Cornerstone is operated by DEVCOM CBC and ACC in Rock Island, Illinois, under the oversight of the IBAS Program Manager.
Cornerstone accelerates research, development, prototyping, demonstration, qualification, and integration of manufacturing capabilities and capacities into the US Industrial Base and supply chains.
In the same way that other government organizations issue “Requests for Proposals “ Cornerstone issues “Cornerstone Initiative Requests” or CIRs”.
Cornerstone membership is required to submit a response to a Cornerstone solicitation. Membership requirements and forms can be found on their web page.
IBAS RESHAPE
The reason for leading you through all this information is that IBAS has just issued a CIR for Advanced Packaging known as RESHAPE (Reshore Ecosystem for Secure Heterogeneous Advanced Packaging Electronics).
Foreign participation, access, transfers, and permit participation for this CIR are restricted and will be approved on a case-by-case basis, and only when in the best interest of the U.S. Government.
Areas of Interest:
The technical elements listed below are independent and the contractor/team may choose which elements to respond to. However, the DoD desires for some elements to be grouped by like processes to minimize material handling and capital equipment reuse.
The focus of this effort is to develop a domestic, trusted, pure-play, and open-access advanced packaging ecosystem for low-volume/high-mix production of 2.5D and 3D Advanced System Integration and Packaging (ASIP) secure solutions. This prototype effort relates to foundational technologies required for advanced system integration of microelectronics packages including the following technologies:
- state-of-the-art (SOTA) wafer preparation techniques
- copper-based silicon and III/V interposers
- fan-out wafer-level packaging (FO-WLP)
- silicon bridges
- high-density build-up (HDBU) substrates
- high-density interconnects (HDI)
- assembly design kits (ADKs) for SOTA computer-aided design (CAD) tools
This prototype effort also relates to using the advanced packaging technologies above for the following DoD applications:
- Radar and EW Sensors
- 5/6G Telecommunications
- Anti-Tamper
- Hardware-Based Cyber Security
- Radiation Hardened Hardware
- Assurance
The contractor shall establish domestic availability of advanced packaging capabilities using methodologies that result in a significant reduction in system-level SWaP and cost over traditional packaging methods. The contractor shall procure capital equipment and develop manufacturing materials and processes to fabricate functional prototypes that will demonstrate improved application performance(s) and reliability levels for the DoD applications.
The contractor(s) responding shall provide a pure-play business model with existing capabilities in microelectronics packaging. For this project, the pure-play outsourced assembly and test (OSAT) business model is defined by the contractor operating in the commercial packaging space with open access to all commercial and defense industrial base companies.
The period of performance is expected to be up to 60 months for each individual award.
So yes, IFTLE was serious when we said advanced packaging is coming back onshore!
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