DARPA's Trust in Integrated Circuits program has been hitting the news on and off over the past few months, ever since they released the details of the program back in December. The program, which aims to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin critical military hardware like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, could give the military, and defense contractors, a guaranteed way to check if their chips have been compromised.

If the program pans out and produces a real way to verify microprocessors, itâ''ll be interesting to see how a Trusted chip imprimatur will play with the Trusted Foundries program. (Trusted Foundries were set up to counter what the DoD perceives as a rising threat to defense microelectronics posed by the offshoring bleed in the semiconductor industry.) Every article about the DARPA program (including mine) maintains that there is no conflict between a chip verification method and the Trusted Foundries program.

Will a DARPA Good housekeeping seal of approval become a standard last step in the trusted foundry procedure? Will one of these Trusted Entities get knocked out of the ring, or will the government integrate them into one oversight body?

All of this brings me to the point: On April 9, Northrop Grumman announced that its Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) semiconductor plant, in Maryland, had just achieved Trusted Foundry status. In fact, their accreditation is Category 1A which is, as you'd expect, the highest level that can be awarded to a foundry. A scant two weeks later, they won multiple contracts for the F-22 Raptor. Northrop gets $252 million to design and manufacture the F-22â''s communications, navigation and identification subsystems. Thatâ''s a lot of chips.

The programs themselves are not in conflict. The first question might be: if you have a way to â''ensureâ'' that a chip is pure, why do you need your own (more expensive) stateside fabs? Because you don't want someone reverse engineering your most mission critical circuits, like the stuff that goes into an F-35. Thatâ''s a no-brainer.

But there are an awful lot of cooks working on the soup.

Trusted Foundries by definition are onshore, and they go through an accreditation process that can only be called grueling; verifying a facility can take months to years.

Then you have your Trusted Designers, like Sandia National Laboratoriesâ'' microelectronics center. These guys design the chips, but their Paleolithic .35 micron fab is ill-equipped to produce chips for anything anyone needs these days, so they send the designs to a trusted foundry to produce.

But some people don't even agree that they're safe once they've hit the foundry. "Even domestically there may be problems," HRLâ''s Charles Henry Field told me (HRL is one of the official TAPO trusted foundries). You need trust all the way through the supply chain. Malicious tampering could happen all the way down the chainâ''what about the delivery truck?"