I started my engineering career with IBM in the Hudson Valley. I went on to work in the semiconductor industry for many years, eventually ending up in the software business, supplying design tools to the industry.
So, I was meeting up with a friend in the business who just got back from a visit to IBM’s Burlington, VT, facility. And he had a couple of interesting observations.
First, IBM’s chip business is one of the only suppliers to the defense industry that is US owned. There are a few smaller players like Honeywell, but they can’t do the advanced fab processes you need to do processors, memory, etc. Intel doesn’t have some of the RF (radio frequency) processes that the military needs, so they’re not a complete substitution.
Second, The Department of Defense is very worried about sending critical chip designs outside the US; they’re worried that they could be back-engineered or even altered prior to fabrication.
Even though only the physical design layout is sent to the fab, it’s still just digital files (think a circuit board with all of the copper traces connecting components, but at a much smaller scale). Inserting a few thousand additional logic gates into a design with hundreds of millions of gates is not particularly difficult. This means a foreign power could, theoretically, insert a hardware backdoor into the chip that would be almost impossible to detect.
This isn’t science fiction. The DOD has been worried about this for years. You can’t look at the chip under a microscope and count gates, etc. to see if you’ve been hacked.
This post was published at Wolf Street on November 12, 2014.
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