DOD picks 10 for $25B microelectronics contract

The Defense Department organization that oversees the delivery of microelectronics across the military has awarded 10 companies positions on a potential 10-year, $25.3 billion contract for broad engineering development support services.

Iteration number five of the Advanced Technology Support Program covers a broad range of work across the entire lifecycle of sophisticated computer chips to include the design, development, analysis, integration and testing aspects.

The Defense Microelectronics Activity received 17 bids in total for this recompete, according to the Pentagon’s Dec. 30 contracts digest.

ATSP5 awardees are as follows:

• Battelle (newcomer)
• Draper (newcomer)
• General Dynamics’ mission systems business unit (incumbent)
• HII (newcomer)
• L3Harris Technologies (newcomer)
• Leidos (newcomer)
• Leonardo DRS (newcomer)
• Northrop Grumman (incumbent)
• RTX's Raytheon unit (incumbent)
• Vertex Aerospace (newcomer, now part of V2X)

DMA awarded the current ATSP4 contract in 2016 to eight companies and has obligated roughly $9.2 billion in work to-date. ATSP4 is slated to sunset on March 31, according to GovTribe data.

Raytheon and Northrop have collectively been awarded 89% of that spend and will carry on, while a pair of other top five incumbents in Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems’ U.S. subsidiary are not on the new awardee list.

DMA set up the ATSP program as a way to ensure military systems have up-to-date microelectronics embedded in them and move away from the problem of obsolescence, or having semiconductors that are multiple generations behind those used in many commercial industries.

Awardees will carry out research-and-development work in areas such as quantum computing and nanoelectronics, three-dimensional and other additive manufacturing techniques, and submicron engineering to develop circuitry at smaller scales.