"I'm guessing there's a clause missing in the contract that says Infineon must disclose all known problems to NASA regardless of how the chips will be used."
The article doesn't say or even imply that NASA has any contract with Infineon.
It seems much more likely they are buying the chips through one of their approved distributors.
Without something saying that NASA bought directly from infineon:
1. It's not obvious how they would know who they sold to.
2. It's not obvious how they could get the information out beyond how they usually do it - issuing erratum notices.
Honestly, it feels like the article goes out of its way to try to imply Infineon should have notified NASA, but gives no data to suggest it had any idea at all what was going on.
If they had data that infineon and NASA had a contract, they would have put it in the article and used much stronger language. All these contracts would be public and are easy to find.
The fact that they don't have anything in the article about this suggests the contracts don't exist, and as usual, they are just using implication instead.
Rad hard parts are basically never sold through distributors. Strict lot traceability is a requirement on space programs (to avoid the issue discussed in the article). The quality departments at the manufacturer and buyer also need to communicate a whole bunch of stuff (requirements, test reports, etc) which defeats the purpose of the insulating layer of a distributor. Also, while these parts are expensive (my rule of thumb is to add 2-3 zeros to the cost of a commercial part to estimate the cost of a rad hard version), they are low volume, so there's not a whole lot in it for a distributor. The contractor working on the electronics almost certainly purchased these parts directly from Infineon, and Infineon would have had records of who purchased parts from which lot.
The fact that they found out about this accidentally at a conference is, all by itself, extremely strong evidence that Infineon didn't notify whoever they should have for the Europa Clipper mission, whether that was NASA itself, an in-house contractor or an external subcontractor.
Other articles[1][2] mention that the transistors came from International Rectifier which was bought by Infineon ten years ago. Maybe Infineon wasn't aware because NASA acquired the transistors through their IR subsidiary. IR provided transistors for the JWST and even for Hubble[3], so they probably were NASAs go-to supplier for this kind of hardware.
The article doesn't say or even imply that NASA has any contract with Infineon. It seems much more likely they are buying the chips through one of their approved distributors.
Without something saying that NASA bought directly from infineon:
1. It's not obvious how they would know who they sold to.
2. It's not obvious how they could get the information out beyond how they usually do it - issuing erratum notices.
Honestly, it feels like the article goes out of its way to try to imply Infineon should have notified NASA, but gives no data to suggest it had any idea at all what was going on.
If they had data that infineon and NASA had a contract, they would have put it in the article and used much stronger language. All these contracts would be public and are easy to find.
The fact that they don't have anything in the article about this suggests the contracts don't exist, and as usual, they are just using implication instead.