Nonprofit military contractor has lofty goals with $13M St. Pete facility

Normally when a defense contractor moves in next door, the last thing they want to do is tell you about it. 

But in 2021 Draper, a nonprofit engineering organization specializing in national security, biotechnology and strategic systems, received $10 million in U.S. Department of Defense spending with a request from the Pentagon: that its new 20,000 square-foot advanced packaging facility in St, Petersburg operate an open foundry service model that stipulates all are welcome to the new playhouse. You just need an escort if you don’t have a clearance.

The open foundry model, say Draper officials, is designed to encourage third-party entities to join the facility and utilize the technology and capabilities. Customers include the Defense Department, other government agencies and commercial companies that require advanced packaging. On the facility itself, Draper has invested at least $3 million in addition to the federal money.

"We're growing in the St. Pete area. We want to make sure people know that we're growing,” says Don Benzing, program and campus manager for Draper at St. Petersburg, “We always want to attract talent to our facility. And the best way to do that is to kind of communicate out in the world that we're open for business. We believe that there's a growing need for what we provide.”

Photo by Mark Wemple

Growth is not a foreign concept for Draper, which is officially the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, based outside Boston in Cambridge. What started as a teaching lab at MIT in the 1930s eventually incorporated in the 1970s and blossomed into a $745.84 million organization with over 1,800 employees across 12 campuses nationwide. The company has made several moves in the Tampa Bay area, first in 2008 with two facilities that eventually closed or sold, then adding Blue Heron, a 20,000 square foot campus in 2016 that anchors the new facility.

The focus of the facility is manufacturing three-dimensional heterogeneously integrated (3DHi) microsystems, or microchips in layman's terms. The Blue Heron building focuses on design and approximately 60 employees hired mostly locally for the new shop focus on the assembly, testing and packaging of the chips. 

“We really are able to take a chip and do some things to it and make it secure. And that's both from a DoD environment and also, ultimately, we hope in a commercial environment,” says Benzing. 

Commercial uses for microchips span multiple industries: secure mobile payments and ATM usage in banking; electronic records in health care; and connected car systems in automotive, to name a few. 

The larger vision for the new space, meanwhile, is twofold: reshoring and training up the workforce. 

“The bigger mission is reshoring,” says Roy Bishop, business development lead for Draper’s electronic systems group, “A lot of the manufacturing that over the last 40 years has been pushed offshore in the manufacturing and production of semiconductors, including advanced packaging.” 

Courtesy image

He cites global conflict causing disruption as a key motivator for supply chain resilience. A recent example happened July 18 when the Bangladesh government completely shut off mobile internet communications for an 11-day blackout period during countrywide protests.

In the decades since jobs were taken offshore, a generational gap formed in the workforce training needed for the new jobs. That's what Draper is up against. 

Draper’s history in academia means no institution is off-limits for potential recruitment. Students ranging from high schools up to postdoctoral are in its sights. “We're going to feed that pipeline early, so that we can eventually catch up. And what we're doing as a packaging facility is recruiting and retaining, training and giving folks a sense of a career path rather than just a job,” says Bishop. 

One barrier is the waiting game. It takes time to get through the process of obtaining a security clearance, and since Covid, the wait times are even longer. Data from the National Industrial Security Program Policy Advisory Council (NISPPAC) says caseloads have grown by about 13,000 over the past year, and previous reports note that more complex cases are driving up overall processing times, according to ClearanceJobs, a networking site for professionals in federal roles. 

But Draper is playing the long game and remains undeterred in its course. 

“Every opportunity, we have to take it. And we have to make sure that we can do the job that we want to do with a company,” Benzing says, “We don't want to take anything on that we wouldn't be able to perform and execute. We're always pushing ourselves. So we're not completely averse to risk, but we want to make sure that we're balanced and that we can perform when we take on a contract.”