In the age of the global chip-supply shortage, any speedup in chip manufacturing and quality-assurance testing is a potential lifeline. So a technique first developed to find instabilities in UNIX command-line prompts in the 1980s is now being retooled to automate chip tests on the assembly line—and discover bugs that could ultimately lead to hardware vulnerabilities like the sort that led to the Meltdown and Spectre flaws and waves of hacks that sprung from them. It’s difficult to patch hardwar...