I'm not sure if there'd be enough volume to justify fabbing and debugging custom silicon. 45,000 missiles have been built over the last 29 years. The newer mode

I'm not sure if there'd be enough volume to justify fabbing and debugging custom silicon. 45,000 missiles have been built over the last 29 years. The newer models probably aren't using the same IR sensors as the ones from 1996, so FPGAs have the advantage being reconfigurable.