How to lose my business permanently

This post is a bit different from my usual ones in that it discusses the business side of the semiconductor industry, not the technical side. The issue has been getting more and more problematic lately so I figured I'd write up a few quick thoughts on it.

Let's suppose you're a large semiconductor company who is currently making a large amount of money selling chips to a couple of major customers. You've decided that your business is too big and you have no desire to get new customers, now or in the future. In fact, you don't even want these companies to use your products in new designs. What are some ways you can get rid of these pesky engineers trying to throw money at you?

1. Make your parts hard to find. Ask major distributors like Digi-Key and AVnet to discontinue stocking them.
2. If someone does manage to find an authorized sales partner, pester them with questions even if they're just looking for a budgetary price quote for a feasibility study. Ask for a project name, description, business plan, names of the team members, color of the soldermask, logo, and anything else you can think of. If it looks like an initial proof of concept that the customer isn't yet confident will become a high-volume product, or a one-off test fixture/lab tool, badger them by asking about annual sales volume and volume ramp-up dates until they lose interest and buy from a competitor.
3. Just in case anyone actually succeeds in buying your part, make it useless to them. Keep the datasheet locked up in a steel vault in your corporate headquarters. Promise would-be customers that you'll let them see it if they sign away their firstborn son and sacrifice a golden lamb on an altar made of FPGAs, but hide the actual NDA contract behind so many redirect pages and broken links that nobody can actually sign it, much less see the actual datasheet. Bonus points if your chip is something commodity like a gigabit Ethernet PHY that has nothing even remotely sensitive in the datasheet.

If you follow these rules properly, congratulations! I'll do my part to further your goals by making sure you will never get design wins in any projects I'm involved in, especially high-volume ones for large companies. Your shareholders will be overjoyed.

Hello 2015 - New job, new projects, and more!

A few months ago, I wrote about some of my pending projects. Several of them are actively running, some are done, and a few new ones cropped up :) I'll be making a bunch of short posts in the next day or so on some of them.

It's been a busy fall so I haven't had time to post anything lately. I'm working hard on my thesis and plan to defend this spring. It's 84 pages and counting...

After I graduate I'll be packing up my lab and moving from Troy, NY to somewhere near Seattle. I'll be working as a senior security consultant in the hardware lab at IOActive, doing board, firmware, and silicon level reversing and security auditing, as well as original research... so you can expect some posts by me on their lab blog in the coming months. My personal lab will likely have a bit of downtime due to the move, although I'd like to get back up and running by the end of the summer at the latest.

I've also submitted a talk based on my CPLD reverse engineering work to REcon. I hinted earlier about the project but there's a lot more to it which hasn't been released publicly... details to come if the talk is accepted ;)