Your Chips Or Your Life!

They are the soul of the personal computer and worth more than their weight in gold or cocaine. Small wonder then that these tiny, high-tech chips have become the latest target of the international crime set. A few tales from the cyberfront: in Greenock, Scotland, three knife-wielding masked men overpowered a factory guard last month and stole $3.7 million worth of chips and related computer parts; in Fremont, California, burglars disarmed a security system and made off with more than $1.8 million of chips and computer equipment in a January warehouse heist. And outside Portland, Oregon, five gunmen bound and gagged 12 workers at a semiconductor plant last fall and fled with $2 million worth of chips.

The idea of stickups inside some of the world's glossy, high-tech laboratories and computer warehouses is a bit incongruous, unless one considers that computer chips are a robber's dream -- very precious (up to $900 for the newest models) and easy to conceal (the size of matchbooks when sealed inside their cases). And these days they are in high demand: the worldwide market for personal computers grew 8%, to $68 billion, in 1993. The main target of thieves is the Intel 486 chip that powers most new IBM PC and IBM-compatible machines; such chips are now in more than one-quarter of the world's 110 million personal computers. Also coveted is the newer and faster Intel Pentium chip, which the Santa Clara, California-based company recently developed to run the latest generation of IBM PCs. In all, thieves last year ripped off up to $40 million worth of chips from California's Silicon Valley, according to the FBI.

So concerned is the agency that earlier this year it opened a high-tech- crime office with a dozen agents in San Jose, California, to clamp down on chip thefts. Among other things, the agents have found a rising threat of heist-related violence. "We're seeing more weapons being used," says special agent Rick Smith. In one stickup a robber put his gun to a chip retailer's head and pulled the trigger, but the weapon failed to fire. "No one's been killed yet," Smith says, "but it's going to happen."

Many robberies are the work of gangs of Chinese or Vietnamese immigrants with ties to shady electronics brokers in the U.S. and Asia who purchase the stolen chips. The gangs first appeared on a small scale in 1987, when they began preying on mom- and-pop Asian distributors based in Silicon Valley. "It's been a real progression," says Santa Clara police sergeant Mark Kerby. "Now they're no longer just robbing Asians. They're robbing everybody."