A British chip factory involved in sensitive military projects has been nationalised by the Ministry of Defence following warnings that it was at risk of closure.
The Government confirmed on Friday that it had purchased the site in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, from US company Coherent.
The deal is understood to be worth around £20m and will secure around 100 local jobs at the company, which is being renamed Octric Semiconductors UK.
A statement described the factory as the country’s only secure site capable of producing gallium arsenide semiconductors, making it “critical to the defence supply chain and major military programmes and exports”.
Ga/As, yes, OK. But one of the things about defence uses is that they’re always vastly behind the curve. Chips advance in 18 month or so cycles. Well, Si ones do, Ga/As might have its own cycle. Defence projects take 15 years to get going and last for decades. The electronics is always vastly behind that bleeding edge.
So, you know, maybe not as militarily important as all that. On the other hand it’s £20 million, in the current contecxt, pfft.
Well… unless they’re aiming at solar cells or superleds…
I think the applications in high-gain radar amplification, energy-efficient IC’s that can run faster than silicon, and overal general radiation resistance may have something to do with them wanting to keep the plant and the stuff it produces.
Unless, of course, you want to order from China? 😉
Isn’t that the point though, Tim? We need a secure site capable of producing spare parts for our obsolete technology when everyone else has stopped producing it. Which is vital to the military.
In my dotage, I can’t remember what they use to make valves/vacuum tubes…
Doesn’t arsenide refer to the Defense Secretary?
The technology may be classed as obsolete due to advancements but military kit needs to work under any conditions and upgrading to new stuff hits issues that can cause failures. So they, and I as much as possible, stick to the old tried and tested kit that just keeps on going.
Won’t see any EV being deployed at the front line in the Ukraine will you. ICE engines are much more reliable.
Grist @ 8.10 – you mean arsehole….
Lord T @ 8.13:
Those who are old enough may remember the Mig 25 Foxbat that was flown to Japan by a Russian defector.
The Japs let the Americans have a real good look before returning it to the Russkies. One very clever Yank pointed out just how archaic the radio was, as it used valves (vacuum tubes). Then someone pointed out that when a nuke goes off, transistors will get fried by the resulting electro magnetic pulse.
Also, the story of the Yanks spending millions trying to get a biro to work in zero gravity (for Apollo). The Russians took a pencil…..
Addolff – the pencil story is a myth, sadly.
Russia has always had clever engineers, but their electronics were always shit. If vacuum tubes conveyed a military advantage they’d still use them, but they don’t because they don’t.
Also their engines have always been inferior to Western models, despite Labour gifting the Rolls Royce Nene to Stalin back when Britain was the world leader in jet engine technology. On paper, the MiG-25 was terrifying to NATO. Western intelligence was greatly relieved when they found out how bad a plane it was.
Arsenide refers to the footer club through which Two-Tier receives a steady flow of bungs.
@Adolff Tubes get fried by EMP as well, unless you take *very* good care of your shielding.
Hence the GaAs semiconductors. They are far more expensive to make, but have a natural “gap” that insulates against EMP spikes which silicon has far less of.
Unless, of course, you’re so close the difference is moot anyway.
In the good old days, I understand the RAF used to advise Victor crews to keep going East, try to land somewhere, and find a sturdy Mongolian wife after they dropped their special weapon on Russia. Because there’d be nothing to go back to.
There’s no point to this anecdote, I just thought it was funny.
20 million for 100 jobs sounds pretty low for a capital intensive business. Unless half the jobs are in FIE, pilgrims and HR of course.
DEI, dammit.
Just security of supply. £20 mil doesn’t seem so bad for a “secure” site.
Tho’ I wonder who does the design?
@Addolff
I was fortunate enough to have attended a briefing about that Mig 25 and how it was taken apart and examined under the tarpaulin. The photos showed a lot of those valves. They were the size of acorns and there was indeed deep concern that they had a lot more EMP resistance than our kit. As the leading valves were essentially spark gaps you got a lot of EMP protection for free.
I’m out if date with that tech but I believe we now use a combination of gas tube spark arrestors and varistors.
What Addolff and others said. There’s sometimes very good reasons to make military kit based on what appears, at first, to be ‘outdated’ or ‘obsolete’ technology. Often, those technologies offer significant advantages in the military sphere, which might be disadvantages elsewhere. Not least of which may be that your adversary doesn’t possess or understand that technology and so is hampered in countering it.
Vacuum tubes/valves are a good example. Not a good choice for aircraft radars, perhaps, but for ground-based very-high-power radars, they are still an optimum technology, extremely resilient and resistant to HEMP events compared to semiconductor devices, and a very-viable part of hybrid approaches. As the US navy continues to learn, a headlong rush to the very latest and greatest technologies might make great business sense, but is sometimes not the best solution when things get kinetic. As Luttwak keeps writing, decade after decade, war is different.
llater,
llamas
andyf: many moons ago I played radios with Raynet, the radio amateurs’ emergency support. We periodically had meetings in the emergency support area under the local police station, colloquially known by us as the Führerbunker. There were antennas on the roof and the cables coming into the Führerbunker had those spark gap cells in the feed. I believe that the gas inside was slightly radioactive (tritium mixed with nitrogen?) to ionise it slightly and reduce the breakdown voltage.
The GaAs could be useful for legacy equipment. The current technology is GaN. Which has higher power, greater efficiency and a better resistance to over voltage. As far as I can tell, Britain is not producing GaN semiconductors outside of university labs.
@Tractor Gent
The those spark gaps were mainly for lightning protection. Absolutely required on mountaintop radio sites.
Awhile back I worked for a company manufacturing semiconductor equipment and we had a special order to make a model we hadn’t made in over 10 years, the sales guys told me it was for a company in the US that made chips for the military and the manufacturing process had to be the same as when they were originally made and they couldn’t use newer equipment
From my experience starting out repairing valve based radio systems and then introducing and maintaining mostly silicon based systems valve systems are a lot easier to trouble shoot and much quicker and cheaper to repair. Swapping a valve out was/is very simple.
It was also very also difficult to generate linear high power RF power amplifiers in those days so and much easier to use valves in the final transmitter stages and and on the receive side it was also easier to build a front end valve with the bandwidth needed to operate across the band with a good linear response.
And as TG says, those valves saved having to design in some for of lightening and EMP protection.
The problem with military procurement is that oftimes you need to be able to secure supplies of spares over very long timeframes.
Modern manufacturing went lean / just in time after the 80s, so nobody keeps stocks any longer.
Our company kept press tools for decades for various companies that only ordered maybe 5/10 parts every 5 years or so. Totally uneconomic for us especially since we also got rid of the presses when all the presswork & toolmakers went off to China.
Some parts can be recreated using more modern manufacturing methods, but then you have to overcome the hurdle of passing QC/inspection standards that may have been written 30 or more years ago by people who are now dead.
I imagine with a lot of electronic components the problem is even worse, and that’s without considering the software side. We still have industrial equipment that runs WfW 3.11 in the background ffs! Maintaining M.O.D equipment and supply lines must be a nightmare.
What happens when your £3b battleship relies on parts and expertise that existed in a company which went bust 5 years ago?
What happens when your £3b battleship relies on parts and expertise that existed in a company which went bust 5 years ago?
Someone sees an opportunity to buy obsolete kit and make an item that will make them a lot of money.
Surely the MOD buys the drawings for parts as well?
Or if a company goes under, buys the drawings then?
Or ensures that components can be manufactured by more than one supplier?
Or is that too sensible?
@Chernny
1. Yes and third party user rights
2. Not required because of 1
3. Tricky because some military kit is very bespoke which is why there has been a move to using Commercial whenever possible over the last few decades
For a good period of time mil spec was a lot higher than commercial, more recently that’s not necessarily so
The problem is the bean counters want it cheap, and don’t want to be locked into a single supplier. In fast moving industries like IT it’s not possible
Major mil platforms have obscolesence management plans, planned tech refreshes etc and try to use components that are in general use
Trouble is the bean counters don’t like that either, they want the military to buy something and keep using for 50 years with minimal investment
Which is why military procurement often resembles Trigger’s broom