NSA runs best fab in world

[Tim May]

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 at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
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