NSA runs best fab in world
Tim May
tcmay at got.net
Fri Jan 5 10:45:22 PST 2001
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
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
More information about the cypherpunks-legacy
mailing list