3 ms·

> One day, the wafer (the thing that the server chip is produced with and is extremely valuable, multi billions in the case of a server chip) went missing. I a

• craftinator 7y ago
  I think the original commenter was missing some key nuts and bolts in his comment.
  • mud_dauber 7y ago
    My thoughts exactly.
  • ScottFree 7y ago
    Can you elaborate?
• monocasa 7y ago
  Nah, I can see a wafer, pre-etcing or soemthing, being way more valuable than a mask set. We as digital logicians are way more at the grace of the process/foundary engineers than we'd like to admit. Also, you can steal important masks without anything being missing.
  • londons_explore 7y ago
    If I were going to steal someone's IP and make unlicensed copies, I'd put a bit more effort in upfront and steal the systemverilog source code. Should be easy enough to do - send someone to work in the IT department responsible for the source code management system - as well as having access to all the code, they'll have knowledge of what protections are in place.
    • monocasa 7y ago
      There's def cool stuff to learn from at each step, including the masks vs the RTL. That was the value add of Intrinsity for instance.
    • atq2119 7y ago
      On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, the investment in the physical design itself is quite significant at the high end, and you can't see that from the HDL source. Frankly, if you're going to steal, you'd want to steal both.