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. <SNIP> -- ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :Surveillance cameras|Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :aren't security. A |share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:camera won't stop a |monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :masked killer, but |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :will violate privacy|site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------
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 :-)
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
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