The Justice Department yesterday announced the guilty plea of a man in Texas who was helping to buy radiation hardened chips for use in military and commercial space systems. Of course, Justice was announcing the confession of this guy, so it will be awhile before they start announcing who the co-conspirators were (and there were some) and how big this operation really was. If you want to know more about these kinds of chips and the environment they have to operate in, check out this briefing on it from Aerospace. If you have a day or two, you might get through the whole briefing. It was more than I could read, but it does point out one useful thing - chips that are good in space, are also good in automobiles which also have heat and vibration difficulties. It also says, however much they try to dominate the chip market, the Chinese cannot even steal all the technology the US has in this area - let alone invent it. They still have to resort to outright theft to get it.
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