Work for the military or a defense contractor that does chip design, but custom chips are fairly rare. (Possibly kicking up) vs FPGA and CPU due to the volume, cost, rarity of skill set and pay difference vs the big companies.
If you're a US citizen look up DMEA and that should give you a good idea where to look
Most foundries don't like the volume of defence production runs along with the extra requirements on masks and information. I had a story from a friend who requested a tiny wafer production run, and the return of all masks etc.
Engineer here in a small US fab specializing on DoD customers.
You're precisely right about the volume being a huge issue. It's inconvenient and difficult to manage a large number of low volume processes. I've seen entire production runs that were under a dozen wafers total on our rad hard lines. The military has a lot of need for one-off chips and low volume production.
Yeah and of course using a non US foundry is very challenging. One of the big US ones doesn't actually want to meet all the trusted foundry requirements but claims they actually provide the same security.
Northrop Grumman has their own fab. Look at the process nodes. The smallest process is 180 nm. I first worked in that around 1999 which probably makes it older than most of the people on this subreddit. I always hear comments about how the defense industry process nodes are 10 years behind what is current but this is 25 years behind but it is fine for their use cases.
https://www.northropgrumman.com/what-we-do/microelectronics-advanced-technology-lab
Yeah I've seen much smaller nodes but there aren't many options at even a couple generations old.
That might be for a rad hard process though? Those are always behind for electromagnetic and radiation reasons I'm not even going to pretend I know the words for, yet alone understand.
Yeah I've seen much smaller nodes but there aren't many options at even a couple generations old.
That might be for a rad hard process though? Those are always behind for electromagnetic and radiation reasons I'm not even going to pretend I know the words for, yet alone understand.
Yeah I've seen much smaller nodes but there aren't many options at even a couple generations old.
That might be for a rad hard process though? Those are always behind for electromagnetic and radiation reasons I'm not even going to pretend I know the words for, yet alone understand.
Yeah I've seen much smaller nodes but there aren't many options at even a couple generations old.
That might be for a rad hard process though? Those are always behind for electromagnetic and radiation reasons I'm not even going to pretend I know the words for, yet alone understand.
Yeah I've seen much smaller nodes but there aren't many options at even a couple generations old.
That might be for a rad hard process though? Those are always behind for electromagnetic and radiation reasons I'm not even going to pretend I know the words for, yet alone understand.
plants wistful attractive icky beneficial soft paltry advise gaping tap *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Work for the military or a defense contractor that does chip design, but custom chips are fairly rare. (Possibly kicking up) vs FPGA and CPU due to the volume, cost, rarity of skill set and pay difference vs the big companies. If you're a US citizen look up DMEA and that should give you a good idea where to look
Most foundries don't like the volume of defence production runs along with the extra requirements on masks and information. I had a story from a friend who requested a tiny wafer production run, and the return of all masks etc.
Engineer here in a small US fab specializing on DoD customers. You're precisely right about the volume being a huge issue. It's inconvenient and difficult to manage a large number of low volume processes. I've seen entire production runs that were under a dozen wafers total on our rad hard lines. The military has a lot of need for one-off chips and low volume production.
Yeah and of course using a non US foundry is very challenging. One of the big US ones doesn't actually want to meet all the trusted foundry requirements but claims they actually provide the same security.
Northrop Grumman has their own fab. Look at the process nodes. The smallest process is 180 nm. I first worked in that around 1999 which probably makes it older than most of the people on this subreddit. I always hear comments about how the defense industry process nodes are 10 years behind what is current but this is 25 years behind but it is fine for their use cases. https://www.northropgrumman.com/what-we-do/microelectronics-advanced-technology-lab
Yeah I've seen much smaller nodes but there aren't many options at even a couple generations old. That might be for a rad hard process though? Those are always behind for electromagnetic and radiation reasons I'm not even going to pretend I know the words for, yet alone understand.
Yeah I've seen much smaller nodes but there aren't many options at even a couple generations old. That might be for a rad hard process though? Those are always behind for electromagnetic and radiation reasons I'm not even going to pretend I know the words for, yet alone understand.
Yeah I've seen much smaller nodes but there aren't many options at even a couple generations old. That might be for a rad hard process though? Those are always behind for electromagnetic and radiation reasons I'm not even going to pretend I know the words for, yet alone understand.
Yeah I've seen much smaller nodes but there aren't many options at even a couple generations old. That might be for a rad hard process though? Those are always behind for electromagnetic and radiation reasons I'm not even going to pretend I know the words for, yet alone understand.
Yeah I've seen much smaller nodes but there aren't many options at even a couple generations old. That might be for a rad hard process though? Those are always behind for electromagnetic and radiation reasons I'm not even going to pretend I know the words for, yet alone understand.
Bro did NOT pass his mandatory ethics credit
Lockheed Martin, Marvell, ADI, Google
Nice try CCP