When Silicon Valley chipmaker Marvell learned that one of its chips was found in a Russian surveillance drone recovered in 2016, it set out to investigate how that came to be.
The chip, which costs less than $2, was shipped in 2009 to a distributor in Asia, which sold it to another broker in Asia, which later went out of business.
"We couldn’t trace it any further,” Marvell Technology Group Chief Operations Officer Chris Koopmans said in a recent interview.