At 12:54 PM -0500 1/4/01, sunder wrote:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/15779.html
NSA runs best fab in world By: Mike Magee Posted: 03/01/2001 at 13:03 GMT
You might think that AMD's Dresden fab is state-of-the-art technology. You might also suspect that Intel and IBM have some pretty nifty technology too, lurking in their clean rooms and in their labs.
And you might be right as far as the commercial world goes. But there's a fab, owned by the US government, and run by the National Security Agency (NSA), which is supposed to knock them into a cocked hat.
I wouldn't believe this for a picosecond. Lots of reasons. For one thing, most of their needs are for building fairly low-tech (designed long ago) PALs, PLAs, gate arrays, ROMs, etc. Cutting edge communications or CPU chips _are_ extremely yield-sensitive, even for a "cost is no object" fab. No way that a little tiny fab on Ft. Meade property, as we understand the NSA fab to be, is making processing chips to compete with Alphas, Pentiums, and UltraSparc IIIs. Lots of other reasons. Frankly, we're seeing _way_ too many articles forwarded from the "UK Register." This is an entertaining Web site, but well over half of the stuff they publish is flaky speculation. The "journalists" who write for the Register often don't even get the names of industry-standard terms right. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns