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Comment by aiscott | Hacker News Reader

The ProAsic3 is a commercial FPGA. So no, it's not military. The military may use it, but that doesn't change that it is a commercial part built to commercial specifications.

To call it a military chip is inaccurate.

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It's ambiguous, not inaccurate. If the military used a certain COTS revolver as standard equipment, and the revolver had a eye-first camera with cellular upload to the public Internet, and that feature was not approved and known by the gun selection people, it is fair to say that "military revolvers upload battlefield images to the Internet, a serious security breach.

It's false, implies everything the military uses is military grade. By that reasoning I'm having military-grade coffe this morning. The keyword you need is "defense-grade". Most fpga vendors sells "defense-grade" FPGAs, for example the Xilinx Virtex 6Q and Spartan 6Q (the 'Q' means defense-grade) a very different product line.

There's a difference between grade and use. Grade implies a certain standard of assurance for a specific market or environment. Use just means it's used by someone, or a group (in this case security).

Heck, people could (if they're nuts) call 44Con a military conference given that it's attended by various armed forces folk. I'd rather people didn't though, but if they want to look stupid while thinking they look smart, who am I to stop them?

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