That the NSA contracted National Semiconductor to build a facility on-site has been common knowledge since 1989-90. The fab is not state of the art (i.e., is not 1.8 micron or better) and is believed to be
Whoops! I meant to say "0.8 micron." For reference points, 66 MHz Pentiums are typically 0.8 micron, 90 and 100 MHz Pentiums are typically 0.6-0.65 micron, and absolute state of the fabs are 0.4 micron (a few in Japan, a few in the U.S.--all very large and very expensive). Intel is spending $1.3 billion (that's $1.3 thousand million to you Brits) on a 0.25 micron fab to be completed in 1996-7 in Chandler, Arizona. If the NSA is building special-purpose cipher-crunchers (which would not surprise any of us), they could easily buy the 1000 or 10,000 or whatever number in the market. They would be fools to try to manufacture state of the art microprocessors in a relatively small, several years old, facility on the outskirts of Fort Meade. (By cipher-crunchers, I mean DES-busters, maybe password-searchers, but not 300-digit number factorers, a la my last post.) The NSC fab at NSA may well be a 1 - 1.5 micron fab, considering it's genealogy. But not much better than that, I would guess. Just as important as the lithographic feature sizes supported is the "Class" rating of the wafer fab (a measure of air purity in terms of particles per unit volume). The NSA fab is almost certainly not a Class 10 fab, and is probably used to fab MSI and LSI components. Maybe a little bit of VLSI. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."