Military chips can erase themselves when tampered with

A closer look

Field Programmable Gate Arrays are blank-slate chips that can rewire their own hardware on the fly, making them highly desirable for military drones. The terrifying problem is that nonvolatile versions remember their top-secret hardware layouts even after the drone is shot down and powered off. To stop enemies from reverse-engineering the silicon, these chips use anti-tamper meshes that instantly fry their own configuration memory the second a hostile screwdriver touches the casing.