http://techweb.cmp.com/eet/news/97/965news/national.html National Security Agency markets commercial ASICs By Loring Wirbel SNOWMASS, Colo. -- On a scale unprecedented for a government intelligence arm, the National Security Agency (NSA) is expanding its selling of ASICs and design services, even offering commercial semiconductor designs for selected space-based and terrestrial applications. Terry Brown, NSA deputy chief of microelectronics, said the customer list will still be so specialized that the agency won't compete directly against developers of military ASICs and rad-hard devices. "Any customer of ours would still require a government sponsor at some level," he said. Nevertheless, at an IEEE conference held recently, representatives of Harris Semiconductor and UTMC Microelectronic Systems wondered how and why a secret government agency would compete against them. One representative of a commercial IC house, who asked not to be identified, said, "Whenever the government thinks it can sell products to OEMs, it inherently raises some problems." The commercial efforts involve NSA's 6-inch CMOS fab, run by National Semiconductor Corp., at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., and a Microelectronics Research Lab run by NSA at an undisclosed Maryland location. The agency has developed special ASICs for selected customers ever since National helped open the fab in the late 1980s. Some, such as the Mykotronx division of Rainbow Technologies Inc., were partners in crypto chips, while others sought NSA expertise in radiation-hardness for space applications. Looking to expand that customer base, the agency has named Leland Miller its first director of marketing for microelectronics. At the IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference, NSA had a large trade booth advertising the capabilities of "NSA Microelectronics." Brown said NSA has special talent in data-path design, used in signal and image processing but ignored by many ASIC vendors. NSA's fab has a library of more than 100 standard cells, optimized for CMOS feature sizes from 0.5 to 1.2 microns. The fab handles double- and triple-metal designs and is just beginning to add non-volatile EPROM and E2PROM cell capabilities.