Chips scans possible to reveal designs
X-Ray Tech Reveals Chip Design in IEEE
No trade secret or hardware trojan can hide from ptychographic X-ray laminography
By ANTHONY F.J. LEVI GABRIEL AEPPLI30 APR 2022
HEN YOU’RE BAKING a cake, it’s hard to know when the inside is in the state you want it to be. The same is true—with much higher stakes—for microelectronic chips: How can engineers confirm that what’s inside has truly met the intent of the designers? How can a semiconductor design company tell whether its intellectual property was stolen? Much more worrisome, how can anyone be sure a kill switch or some other hardware trojan hasn’t been secretly inserted?
Today, that probing is done by grinding away each of the chip’s many layers and inspecting them using an electron microscope. It’s slow going and, of course, destructive, making this approach hardly satisfactory for anybody.
One of us (Levi) works with semiconductors and the other (Aeppli) with X-rays. So, after pondering this problem, we considered using X-rays to nondestructively image chips. You’d need to go beyond the resolution used in medical X-ray scanners. But it was clear to us that the needed resolution was possible. At that moment, what we’ve been calling the “chip scan” project was born. ...'
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