“Gulf War” 2010
“Sir, we captured one of their soldiers who was carrying this. It seems it is some form of high-performance communication system based on an advanced chip they have developed.”
“What? A chip they developed?”
“Yes. Intelligence believes they got it from a foundry in Malaysia--the one they said we couldn’t use! Apparently they paid some designers from Prague a lot of money to design it for them. They paid the foundry over $100 million for running the wafers. It’s much better than anything we have right now.”
Notes:
With the advent of a truly global high-performance silicon industry and with the increasing value of silicon in systems, it is increasingly likely that for the right price (high!) any group will be able to buy access to state-of-the-art silicon.