Re: [s-t] needle in haystack digest #3 (fwd from Nick.Barnes@pobox.com)
At 08:22 PM 11/6/03 -0800, Tim May wrote:
I heard ten years ago that the National Semi fab on-site was a lowly 2-micron fab. Which was enough for keying material.
And rad-hard circuits for their buddies at the NRO. And 2 mics is fine for certain esoteric processes. Got GaAs? That's done on 6" wafers. Of import to those who like listening to the aether. But if you want a suitcase DESCracker (stuffing Sun chassis is so passe, though it was a fine recycling program and probably emptied some space in JG's garage :-) you use 90 nm FPGAs. NSA folks probably wear GSM and WEP crackers as cufflinks. Maybe they have competitions to see who can program those crackers on their kids' gameboys.
"Major Variola (ret)" <mv@cdc.gov> wrote:
At 08:22 PM 11/6/03 -0800, Tim May wrote:
I heard ten years ago that the National Semi fab on-site was a lowly 2-micron fab. Which was enough for keying material.
And rad-hard circuits for their buddies at the NRO.
Probably not on a CMOS process, though. For the most part, rad-hard==bipolar, even nowadays. -- Riad Wahby rsw@jfet.org MIT VI-2 M.Eng
On Thursday, November 6, 2003, at 09:56 PM, Riad S. Wahby wrote:
"Major Variola (ret)" <mv@cdc.gov> wrote:
At 08:22 PM 11/6/03 -0800, Tim May wrote:
I heard ten years ago that the National Semi fab on-site was a lowly 2-micron fab. Which was enough for keying material.
And rad-hard circuits for their buddies at the NRO.
Probably not on a CMOS process, though. For the most part, rad-hard==bipolar, even nowadays.
Most ULSI today is BiCMOS, but Intel, Harris, and a bunch of others were making rad-hard CMOS nearly 20 years ago. The 80C86 rad hard part was and is used in a lot of critical apps. True enough, a project I consulted on picked the AMD 2901 for the Galileo Jupiter mission, and it was bipolar. And of course the concern with shrinking geometries has moved from "suntan" effects (long exposure) to SEUs. And here the advantages mostly are with SOI (as they were with SOS and SOI when I started working on SEUs in 1977). --Tim May
participants (3)
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Major Variola (ret) -
Riad S. Wahby -
Tim May