On Sat, 31 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

Tyler D asked about how the NSA could be so far ahead. Besides their ability to make 2" sq. chips at 10% yield (not something a commercial entity could get away with)

What, exactly, would be the point of doing this?

they can also *thin and glue* those chips into say stacks of 5 thinned die.

As easily as you could do this to high efficiency chips.

2" sq = 4 x performance

How do you figure 4x performance on a 2" chip? Most of the chip performance is tied to the total distance that signals must traverse across the chip surface.

5 thinned die with GHz vias = 20 x performance.

with any chip, regardless of design.

Both are uneconomical but feasible. Get it?

No.

Any questions?

Yes. See above. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org 0xBD4A95BF "...justice is a duty towards those whom you love and those whom you do not. And people's rights will not be harmed if the opponent speaks out about them." Osama Bin Laden - - - "There aught to be limits to freedom!" George Bush - - - Which one scares you more?

But most cryptanalysis types of things are economic defenses. (ie you can spend $lots you can break; or you don't have enough $ to build because the $ at current tech is an astronomical multiple of the US national debt). So if the NSA are being stupid, and uneconomical with the black budget (and it's not that hard for large organizations even with competition to be stupid), then they will be even less likely to break things that they could break than if they outsourced the whole thing. Probably to their advantage, I presume they do in fact outsource many things and of course buy large expensive bits of machinery and components, as anyone must do. So anyway, doing uneconomical things with the black budge they would lessen their chance of breaking various things, not increase it. Now the sheer scale of the black budget allows some things, but no doubt their best strategy will be to do economical things wrt their objectives and priorities and put as much as they can out for commercial tender, and/or try to create internal competition or something. Adam On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 05:50:36PM -0700, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

Tyler D asked about how the NSA could be so far ahead. Besides their ability to make 2" sq. chips at 10% yield (not something a commercial entity could get away with) they can also *thin and glue* those chips into say stacks of 5 thinned die.

2" sq = 4 x performance 5 thinned die with GHz vias = 20 x performance.

Both are uneconomical but feasible. Get it?

Any questions?

----- all your burst-mode wall-chair-molding-bugs in the state dept are belong to us...