At 12:50 PM 1/4/01 -0500, sunder wrote:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/15779.html
NSA runs best fab in world
Commercial fabs are enormously constrained by profitability: you could build huge chips except the yield drops, because a single error usually trashes the chip. The NSA doesn't need to worry about profitability. The NSA gets to play with expensive (GaAs) high-performance processes that are only used commercially when necessary. The NSA could make low volumes of chips using E-beam tech which is not commercially used (because each chip has to be carved individually instead of printed en masse). This would let them make features *much much* finer than the very hard UV of the optolitho future. This means faster, denser chips. And they get to do long-term R&D into far out architectures, processes, materials, etc. Sounds like a fun job, but no stock options, among other problems :-)