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

Patent law, firstly. Any distributed chips that breach Nvidia’s patent will get sued and hit with a C&D immediately.

Second, it’s not like they’re delivering the information via carrier pigeon. It’s all securely encoded and sent via highly secure servers. It would take an impressive team of hackers to gain access to it, and like I said, even if they did for whatever reason decide to do this, it wouldn’t have much value because anyone who tried to manufacture it outside of Nvidia’s control would be sued to high heaven.