When The Part No Longer Exists: How Chip Reclamation is Solving One of Defense and Industry's Hardest Supply Chain Problems

There is a quiet crisis playing out across defense programs, aerospace platforms, medical devices, and industrial control systems right now, and most people outside of supply chain and sustainment engineering have never heard its name.

It's called DMSMS: Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages. In plain terms: the chip your system depends on no longer exists. The factory that made it closed. The supplier discontinued the line. The raw materials are gone. And the system that needs it - a radar array, a flight control computer, an MRI scanner, an industrial PLC - was designed to last 30 years. This is not a hypothetical. It is happening today, at scale, across virtually every sector that operates long-lifecycle hardware.

Why DMSMS is Inevitable

Modern semiconductors are designed for consumer and commercial product cycles, typically three to seven years. The systems they go into, particularly in defense and critical infrastructure, are designed to operate for decades. That gap is where DMSMS lives. No program is immune. The DoD's own SD-22 Guidebook which is the gold standard for obsolescence risk management, acknowledges this directly: DMSMS issues are not a matter of if, they are a matter of when. When a component reaches end-of-life and no mitigation plan is in place, the consequences are serious:

• Grounded fleets and sidelined ships, waiting on parts that no longer ship

• Emergency redesign costs that can run into the millions for a single LRU

• Counterfeit parts infiltrating the supply chain as desperate sourcing opens the door to gray market risk

• Program delays that cascade across sustainment contracts and operational readiness

The traditional playbook has always been to catch it early and act fast.

The Traditional Mitigation Toolkit

Proactive DMSMS management gives programs several tools to work with:

Life-of-Type (LOT) Buys - The moment an End-of-Life notice is issued, you buy enough inventory to last the system's operational life. It works, but it requires capital, storage, and the foresight to catch the EOL notice before it's too late.

Design Refresh/Redesign - Modify the system architecture to use modern, available components. The right long-term answer in many cases, but expensive, time-consuming, and subject to requalification requirements that can stretch years.

Alternative Sourcing - Find a secondary manufacturer, or reverse-engineer the part under original IP. Viable when the IP is accessible and a fabrication partner exists.

Emulation - Build a modernized functional equivalent using contemporary semiconductor processes. Powerful when done right, but not fast or inexpensive.

Each of these strategies has a place. But there are situations where none of them are practical, and that's where a different solution becomes critical.

Chip Reclamation: The Strategy the Industry Is Now Taking Seriously 

When a lifetime buy was missed, a redesign isn't justified, and no alternate source exists, chip reclamation - also known as component harvesting - has emerged as one of the most effective and underutilized tools in the DMSMS mitigation arsenal. The concept is straightforward: recover functioning microchips from decommissioned or obsolete hardware, refurbish them, test them rigorously, and return them to service. The execution requires precision, expertise, and equipment that very few facilities in the world possess.

At Hatch Manufacturing Solutions, working in partnership with Retronix - the global leader in traditional and laser BGA reballing and component reclamation, this is exactly what we do.

The process looks like this:

• Extraction - Chips are carefully desoldered from obsolete or decommissioned circuit boards using controlled thermal or laser processes that preserve the die and package integrity.

• Cleaning and Re-balling - Retronix's precision laser reballing capability restores the solder ball array to original specification, whether leaded (SnPb for MIL-spec compliance) or lead-free, without thermal damage to sensitive packages.

• Testing and Characterization - Reclaimed components undergo full electrical characterization, functional testing, and visual inspection including X-ray analysis. Every part is verified against original specifications before it goes back into service.

• Return to Service - The refurbished component re-enters the supply chain as a qualified, traceable part with documentation to satisfy program and contract requirements.

Where This Matters Most

Chip reclamation is not a universal replacement for proactive DMSMS management. It is a precision tool for specific, high-stakes situations. It is most powerful when applied to:

Defense and Aerospace Sustainment - Legacy avionics, radar systems, fire control computers, and missile guidance platforms where a complete redesign is cost-prohibitive and a single unavailable IC threatens operational readiness.

Military Ground Vehicles and Naval Systems - Long-service-life platforms where original electronics are no longer producible and the cost of system-level redesign dwarfs the cost of component recovery.

Medical Devices and Diagnostic Equipment - Where the regulatory cost of redesigning and requalifying a cleared device can be orders of magnitude higher than recovering the original component.

Industrial Control Systems and Infrastructure - SCADA systems, PLCs, and process controllers running on 20-year-old architectures where downtime is measured in millions of dollars per hour.

Data Center AI Infrastructure - As GPU generations cycle every 18 months, there is growing value in recovering accelerators and critical components from decommissioned racks, both for cost recovery and to support circular supply chain commitments.

What Hatch Manufacturing Solutions Brings to This Problem

Hatch Manufacturing Solutions is a specialized solutions provider operating at the intersection of supply chain resilience, electronics sustainment, and advanced manufacturing services. We work with defense contractors, aerospace primes, medical OEMs, industrial operators, and data center operators to address exactly these challenges.

Through our partnership with Retronix, the only company in the industry offering both traditional and laser BGA reballing at scale, alongside full chip and component reclamation capability, we bring a complete, end-to-end solution to DMSMS mitigation that most programs have never had access to before.

If your program is sitting on an EOL notice with no good options, if your sustainment team is staring at a bill-of-material full of discontinued parts, or if your depot is scrapping assemblies that could be saved, we want to have that conversation.

The Time to Act is Before the Crisis

The DoD SD-22 Guidebook is unambiguous: the programs that manage DMSMS well are the ones that start early. But even when the crisis is already here, there are options, and chip reclamation is increasingly one of the most powerful of them.

If you are working in sustainment engineering, supply chain management, program management, or hardware operations at an organization that operates long-lifecycle electronics, this problem will find you, if it hasn't already.

Hatch Manufacturing Solutions is here to help you solve it.

David Hatch is the founder of Hatch Manufacturing Solutions, a specialized provider of electronics sustainment and supply chain resilience services. Hatch Manufacturing Solutions partners with Retronix, the global leader in BGA reballing and component reclamation, to deliver end-to-end DMSMS mitigation solutions across defense, aerospace, medical, industrial, and data center markets.

To discuss your program's needs, contact me at david@hatch-mfg.com

(508-965-0222)

www.retronix.com