NSA runs best fab in world

[David Honig]

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 :-)