[davidf18]

I suspect that one way or the other the military and spy agencies will be funding the further development for national security and weapons reasons. It may not be known, but they are (or will be) funding either directly or indirectly.

[Animats]

The US military hasn't been a significant driver of electronic technology since the 1980s. They just don't have the volume to affect the technology path. Military electronics tends to lag commercial, because the life cycles are longer. The USAF's big electronics problem is obtaining supplies of obsolete parts.

The pure military stuff tends to be in the sensor space. DARPA has some projects to build much better accelerometers and gyros on ICs. They want cheap inertial navigation to back up GPS.

It's possible to reach much higher densities by writing an IC with an electron beam. This is slow, but useful for one-off jobs. DoD is known to be using that.[1] "DoD foundries make a wide variety of custom chips in small quantities - the exact opposite of commercial practice." Interestingly, the USAF is doing this partly because they don't trust off-the-shelf chips not to have "backdoors".

[1] http://www.multibeamcorp.com/PR_MB20170525.htm

[filereaper]

IBM's previously owned East-Fishkill Foundries have long been part of the DoD Trusted Foundries list. [1] (Slide 8)

IBM split off and kept the R&D part of the foundries and sold the manufacturing aspect to GlobalFoundries.

[1]http://www.acq.osd.mil/se/briefs/2016-TrustPolicy-Baldwin.pd...