FBI Says Russians Smuggled Out US Microchips

choi

Andrew E Kramer, FBI Says Russians Smuggled Out US Microchips; A possible blow to Moscow's spycraft and scientific pride. New York Times, Oct 5, 2012.
www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/world ... chips-fbi-says.html

Quote:

(a) "The real blow to Russian scientific pride is the suggestion that the country’s military and intelligence agencies are still reduced to stealing commercially available chips from the United States, after years of failing to create a computer industry here.

"The chips, which the FBI said had been bought by a Houston company called Arc Electronics Inc that falsely presented itself as a manufacturer of traffic lights, reportedly wound up in such vaunted Russian weapons as MIG fighter jets and anti-ship missiles.

(b) "The Russian inability to make microchips goes back decades and has sapped the confidence of generations of engineers here. In the late Soviet period it bared, dramatically, the ever-widening technological gap with the United States. Russians took to bragging darkly that Soviet microchips here were the biggest in the world.

"The smuggled American chips, the FBI said, could be used in missile guidance systems, radar, police surveillance equipment or bomb triggers.

My comment:
(a) China also can not make advanced microchips.
(b) I wonder why Russians do not order custom-made microchips from Taiwan. Probably they already did, and US already knew, and the microchips Russians got may have a kill switch.