So I have bought Supermicro motherboards in quantity in the past. We went through a distributor and shipping was not direct from China. So I'm having doubts t

So I have bought Supermicro motherboards in quantity in the past. We went through a distributor and shipping was not direct from China. So I'm having doubts that Supermicro's Chinese CM has any idea who the end customer of any of their boards is. Maybe it's different for really huge customer, but I still have doubts- it implies they are building to order and have no inventory. This implies that the CM installs the Chinese Spy Chip on every board, or a random sampling of boards (so they should show up in the wild) or the tampering happens later in the supply chain- in the US. Also I have further doubts about embedding a chip in a middle layer of a PCB. I doubt the CM is going to add that much extra expense when it's easier to add a chip to the surface. You don't really buy much secrecy from embedding a chip given that it's easy to x-ray a board, so why bother? Anyway, there are devices called optical comparators. Supermicro could buy some security by providing comparison images that allow customers to perform an incoming inspection. I'm thinking they should do this now to add assurance / help their stock price. Here is an optical one: https://www.visionxinc.com/digital-optical-comparators/pcb https://www.visionxinc.com/digital-optical-comparators/pcb Here is an X-Ray one: http://www.glenbrooktech.com/multi-layer-pcb.php http://www.glenbrooktech.com/multi-layer-pcb.php Maybe the X-Ray inspection could pick up the Ethernet connector attack.