3 ms·

anyone know how much this process costs?

• hga 17y ago
  Enough that they didn't pay to have the metal layers "peeled off" one by one (or just all of them as Arubis suggests) so that we could start to guess what it really is....
  • Arubis 17y ago
    The consumables involved in stripping off metal and oxide layers have a negligible price point. Most of the cost is engineer time, though how much depends on what equipment/techniques are used (liquid chemistry, manual polishing, plasma processing, etc.). This isn't the case with all circuit forensics techniques: once you start loading parts into more expensive equipment (even electron microscopes) you're paying for tool time to offset training and tool value depreciation. I know that's not really quantifying things, but that's something you'd have to get from the lab that actually performed the work. EDIT: if it helps, the actual process of removing a metal layer and an oxide layer varies with the process, but would generally take under an hour (and usually well under). There exist techniques to skip all that and go straight to silicon significantly faster, though as these are all destructive processes, you lose the ability to go back and see what was there before.
  • olihb 17y ago
    I would not be surprised if Chipworks wasn't paid for this article. It might have been a PR project. At work we sometime do this to get our company in the news.