Faint IC Marking

Not a black van, guys in jackets with "FBI" on the back simply knock on your door and serve the arrest warrant. You get a public trial and everything. The bad part is you give all your money to a lawyer before you go to jail.

If you are not the exporter you *still* have to worry about where the shipments go. If you have any reason to believe the shipments are leaving the country you still have responsibility to know *where* they are going outside the country. This is usually handled by paperwork you get the exporter to sign saying they won't ship to the countries at issue.

That might trigger it, but simply having it *available* on the net is deemed tantamount to exporting the data, which *may* be controlled.

--sp

So you're afraid of getting caught violating export laws?

Having a _serial_number_ on the net will get you arrested? Unbelievable.

You could always grind it off with a dremel, until they make it illegal to posess or export a chip without a QR code. I guess a serial number is quite likely burned into some fuses on the die also, which would be impractical to do anything about, but more effort to routinely spy on.

From the web: "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a genuine workers' state in which all the people are completely liberated from exploitation and oppression." Seems i have an easy sell for the Brooklyn bridge..

No, we don't violate export laws.

Regards, Allan

It's just as well the big FPGAs aren't made in the USA. I'm reasonably sure that Xilinx mostly uses fabs and packaging plants in Asia.

I actually find the whole munitions thing funny, because we export controlled stuff *to* the USA, who in turn would require rather more paperwork to export it back out again.

(I shouldn't give the wrong impression; we actually take export controls very seriously.)

Regards, Allan

It's not just physical objects, either--I had to turn down a consulting gig with FLIR because it came out of their Swedish operation.

If I bought one of their cameras, I couldn't send it back for warranty repa irs.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yes, even simply returning a controlled item to the US for repair- there is no guarantee that you can ever get it back again.

Most advanced countries have fairly reasonable export control laws with extremely severe penalties for abuse, but few have shot themselves in the foot as badly as the US on ITAR, especially with very good European and some decent Asian/Eastern European competitors.

Then why do you care who is looking at the serial number of your FPGA?

ng

of

So

o,

it is somewhat theoretical but once the device is out of your hands there is always the risk that it eventually ends up in a place it shouldn't

-Lasse

So what if it does?