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Comment by kryptiskt | Hacker News Reader

"Currently there is no economical or timely way of ascertaining if a manufacturer's specifications have been altered during the manufacturing process (99% of chips are manufactured in China),"

That claim about 99% of chips being manufactured in China is very easy to verify as being utterly false. I have to wonder about the trustworthiness of the rest.

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To add, silicon can, and obviously is inspected by manufacturer using optical and electronic microscopes. There are companies specialized in reverse engineering chips or verifying existing components. Even hobbyists can grind down chips and figure out what the circuitry does, using nothing more than good optics and a digital camera plus freely available software to stitch the images together and start analyzing traces from the picture.

Sure, this stuff gets harder with modern technology, but it would be ridiculous to assume that manufacturers blindly click together chips and hope for the best because they can't inspect their work.

I've seem to recall something regarding this. The manufacturer has the exact blueprints to help guide them. Reverse engineers can't rely on the blueprints because they might be comprised.

Is there any way to mangle it to being true? I don't think so.

Maybe 99% of volume, but not type, is produced in China.

Or 99% of types are made in China, but with volume elsewhere.

Maybe 99% of this particular IC family are made in China, with the rest being made elsewhere is something that works.

I'm sure places like Japan, Korea, Taiwan etc make more than 1%, regardless of type vs volume.

The 99% does strike me as something that was thumbsucked.

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