if nVdia doesn’t manufacture their own chips and sends their design document to tsmc, what’s stopping foreign actors to steal those documents and create their custom version of same design document and get that manufactured at other fab companies?

Question

if nVdia doesn’t manufacture their own chips and sends their design document to tsmc, what’s stopping foreign actors to steal those documents and create their custom version of same design document and get that manufactured at other fab companies?

In: Technology

Answer 1

There aren’t really any other fab companies. TSMC and Samsung have the most advanced fabs, intel is a bit behind them. No one else is close. All three of those companies use EUV lithography equipment from ASML, and no one else in the world makes those machines.

You could of course steal the designs for the chips and ASML’s EUV lithography tech, but by the time you reverse engineer the design and figure out how to make it, the chip will be 5-10 years out of date, basically worthless to make at that point. They’d also be illegal in the US and EU for violating patents.

The USSR used this strategy for decades and as a result they were always at least a few years behind the west in terms of chip manufacturing.