Dean Collins This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. web1.foreignpolicy.com

   web1.foreignpolicy.com/taxonom - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/15/2008   Last Visited: 5/17/2008

   Dean Collins, deputy director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office and program manager for the Trust in IC initiative ... notes that many defense contractors rely heavily on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs),a kind of generic chip that can be customized through software ... "If you make a mistake on an FPGA, hey, you just reprogram it," says Collins."That's the good news.The bad news is that if you put the FPGA in a military system, someone else can reprogram it."
   
   Almost all FPGAs are now made at foundries outside the United States, about 80 percent of them in Taiwan.Defense contractors have no good way of guaranteeing that these economical chips haven't been tampered with.Building a kill switch into an FPGA could mean embedding as few as 1000 transistors within its many hundreds of millions."You could do a lot of very interesting things with those extra transistors," Collins says.

2. 2. Inaugural SEMI 'Nano U' to Discuss Latest Research

   www.photonics.com/content/trad - [Cached]

   Published on: 10/30/2006   Last Visited: 12/3/2006

   "Nanotechnology: The New Era of Defense and Aerospace" will be discussed by Michael Postek, assistant to the director for nanotechnology and nanomanufacturing program manager at NIST; Ken Babcock, CEO of Affinity Biosensors; Dean Collins, deputy director of the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA; and Thomas Feist, Thin Film Lab manager at GE Global Research.

3. 3. Blake Hounshell's blog | FP Passport

   web1.foreignpolicy.com/blog/40 - [Cached]

   Last Visited: 5/17/2008

   Dean Collins, deputy director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office and program manager for the Trust in IC initiative ... notes that many defense contractors rely heavily on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs),a kind of generic chip that can be customized through software ... "If you make a mistake on an FPGA, hey, you just reprogram it," says Collins."That's the good news.The bad news is that if you put the FPGA in a military system, someone else can reprogram it."
   
   Almost all FPGAs are now made at foundries outside the United States, about 80 percent of them in Taiwan.Defense contractors have no good way of guaranteeing that these economical chips haven't been tampered with.Building a kill switch into an FPGA could mean embedding as few as 1000 transistors within its many hundreds of millions."You could do a lot of very interesting things with those extra transistors," Collins says.