Sabotage? probably highly likely. Even a power blip can scrap millions of dollars in product. You don't even have to hack a FAB, hack the local substation...hel

Sabotage? probably highly likely. Even a power blip can scrap millions of dollars in product. You don't even have to hack a FAB, hack the local substation...hell hack the local airport or port and you can put them in discomfort. Actual backdoor? almost impossible. A backdoor would have to change the interconnections within the chips. That isn't a function performed by the FAB software. The design of the chip circuitry is designed much earlier. Once validated and released it is then laser / ion beam etched into a series of 'masks.' The mask represent the different layers of the chip that make up the interconnections. They are used in photolithography and are typically made elsewhere and then used thousands of times. Like a photo. To put a backdoor in the chip you would have to, undetected, hack the design side of a chip company. And do it early enough that without being noticed the backdoor is created into the masks which then get built into all of the chips and still remain unnoticed. It would be much easier to bribe a couple employees. Edit: a simple analogy - lets say you hack my oven. You can burn my cake and undercook it and give me food poisoning. But you can't swap the salt for sugar in the pan unless you actually had physical access.