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

Their latest chips must be manufactured using the latest manufacturing technology, often referred to as “xx nanometer nodes”. The current node process is 4 nanometers, which used to refer to a specific part of a transistor. You can count on all your fingers how many plants in the world that have the technology to produce chips using that process.