With a financial trading environment, it should be easy to tell whether the approved plan is what got executed. How would you audit the chip manufacturer to ensure that they're using the design you approved?

> How would you audit the chip manufacturer to ensure that they're using the design you approved?

would pki be of some help here ? where final tapeout is signed with your and their keys as well for example.

How do you know the chip as fabbed conforms to the final tape out?

umm, i am unaware if it is possible for manufacturing companies to make changes like these to a design handed out. can you please explain how ?

The design as presented to the fab is usually "GDSII" format, which is a huge list of polygons on various layers.

Manufacturing companies usually have to run this through preprocessing in order to make the interference lithography work properly. In the end, they produce a bunch of IC masks, and it's always possible to ""manually"" (with expensive tools) cut another hole in the mask.