The conventional--and convincing to me--story has been that they had National Semi (and maybe others) help them with local fabs. These are fabs for things like key chips (the ICs carrying keying material in whatever form, for Permissive Action Links, and ultra-sensitive kinds of stuff that they wouldn't the usual cranked-up fab workers in Sunnyvale or Nampa getting near).No Such Agency doesn't fab much of anything; they can't afford to. They
and their ilk are far more interested in things like FPGAs and adapting
numerical algorithms to COTS SIMD hardware, such as graphics processors
(a la http://www.gpgpu.org/).Why do they have their own fab plant if they don't fab anything? http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/facility/nsaspl.htm
I heard ten years ago that the National Semi fab on-site was a lowly 2-micron fab. Which was enough for keying material.
Crunching chips, for special purpose computers, don't carry the same security requirements, as the secret stuff in the code that is being run and not the fuses or links being blown. For this, they would use whatever is out there.
--Tim May
