> Second, would have it been cheaper to manufacture somewhere more trustworthy (another country?) instead of spending all this time/money on your anti-hack systems?
I'd like to know this too. Has the West completely lost the ability to mass produce microchips at even a reasonable cost for financial applications?
America has fabs, both old and leading edge, but ask industry giants like Gemalto to even bother to manufacture chips anywhere outside of Taiwan, assemble the final product outside of China.
They will never do that, because they look for the cheapest solution.
The bigger the company, the less it cares about things other than cost. This is why Mediatek and Broadcom can usurp the market of network SoCs, while making products with atrociously bad support. I personally dealt with both, and say that they wholely match their popular culture image.
I don't know how it is with USA, but for Russia, the military doesn't care that their chips had frequency measured in kilohertz, and had sizes measured in square sentimetres, for as long as they get them made inside the country.
Gemalto manufactures and assembles many, many products in Europe. The entire European security cluster won't use anything else. I know because I played a part in smart card development there. And all of that was from Europe. Wafers, chips, holograms, mag stripes...
Not exactly, PCB assembly is super cheap everywhere thanks to propagation of chipshooters, what makes the cost go up is logistics - what do you do after you populate the board for your part? Ship it across the world, or to another factory behind the corner?
That largely depends on the size of your board and the total number you want to ship. As soon as you reach full truck loads or full container loads that additional shipping cost is marginal on a board level.
You are right in a certain way. What increases with distance is lead time and as result inventory. Both of which are off set by volume. Cross-border adds customs issues. Complexity is not that much of a problem nowadays, maybe it never was. You are right that all of this oblyakes sense with large numbers, small scale production is better done locally as a rule of thumb.
> for Russia, the military doesn't care that their chips had frequency measured in kilohertz, and had sizes measured in square sentimetres
Well, if your chips are bigger and slower, you will need more chips and mounts/packaging to place them. If you need more chips then the weight of missile/plane/tank will be increased and available space decreased.
So at the end, the 'uncaring' military will receive a weapon which is worse than competition.
I think people should know how stark the differences for assembly in the US are vs outside of it. Something that costs, at low prototype volumes mind you, $20 in China for a dozen boards or so, would run hundreds of dollars in the US and still take the same amount of time. As it scales up, the ratio might improve, but these aren't like 10%-20% differences.
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at first I had the same thought. but i have to question how securely the same manufacturing could be done in a US plant.
the US employee base has its fair share of desperate, ethically challenged individuals. and plenty of incentives to make a quick buck could be offered here too. idk.
OTOH, given US law enforcement's low efficiency what are the chances of being caught? and what if it's merely corporate espionage?
finally, the US is an open society with strong personal freedom guarantees builtin. what if the perpetrator has ties to a foreign country and simply leaves the US after they've installed the vulnerabilities?
I'd like to know this too. Has the West completely lost the ability to mass produce microchips at even a reasonable cost for financial applications?