Cover story
Meeting Defence and Supply Chain
Demands in a Shifting Landscape Mitigating component risks for long-lifecycle systems
Defence programs rely on long-lifecycle systems, but today’s semiconductor market moves far faster. This article explores how global collaboration, proactive supply chain strategies, and Rochester Electronics’s authorised solutions help ensure critical technologies remain supported for decades.
G
lobal collaboration in a strategically coordinated defence electronics supply chain is essential for safeguarding national and allied security interests.
No single nation typically possesses all the capabilities, scale, or resilience necessary to meet the long term and often unpredictable demands of modern defence programs. By leveraging the unique strengths of allied regions, governments and industry partners can create a highly capable and responsive ecosystem. This collaborative strategy mitigates risks such as single-source dependency, trade disruptions and adversarial interference, while also enabling the quicker adoption of emerging technologies, shared standards and coordinated obsolescence management. Most importantly, it enhances collective resilience, ensuring that defence programs remain operational and supported throughout lifecycles that often extend beyond multiple decades. Defence programs made signifi cant contributions to early advancements in semiconductor technology during the 1970s
06 September 2025
www.electronicsworld.co.uk
and early 1980s. The semiconductor industry and the defence sector have maintained long-standing relationships dating back to the 1960s. However, over the 45 years Rochester Electronics has been in the industry, we have observed a signifi cant divergence in the requirements and objectives of these sectors, resulting in a substantial lifecycle imbalance. Today, leading semiconductor manufacturers primarily focus on high-volume consumer markets, the data centre, and the automotive industry. The data centre and consumer markets feature rapid innovation cycles, providing smaller, lower-cost packages, reduced power consumption, and relatively short product lifecycles, typically ranging from fi ve to ten years. While these attributes benefi t fast-turn commercial markets, they do not align with the extended lifecycle requirements of aerospace, defence, or transportation systems. Current geopolitical tensions are leading to signifi cant
increases in defence spending globally, with most NATO members meeting the 2% of GDP target and others, such
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