Abstract:

The Qualified Manufacturer List (QML) approach, detailed in MIL-I-38535, General Specification for Integrated Circuits (Microcircuit) Manufacturing, embraces many of the commercial practices employed by high volume microcircuit suppliers. Nevertheless, with the availability of highly reliable and lower cost commercial parts, the QML approach becomes unnecessary and undesirable.

This paper shows why U.S. government support of the QML program is leading the military and government to unaffordable access to out-dated technologies, damaging our country's military and avionics position.

This paper presents the information to show why we support the retraction of MIL-PRF-38535 and any other documents which infer that QML parts are superior to commercial parts, including those of QPL, MIL-STD-454, and MIL-HDBK-217 (now prohibited from use in all new Army programs).

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