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> My concern is more about the ability for the Chinese to potentially reverse engineer these products at assembly Would that be substantially more difficult wi

• akiselev 8y ago
  In order to push the performance on high end chips, you have to improve thermal conduction between the wafers and the chip package. This usually requires some sort of material (sort of like thermal paste) that doesn't interfere with the electronics but still provides excellent thermal conductivity. You can't use metallic compounds because it would short the wafer so in practice the material usually has strong bonding properties like a glue. The smaller your feature sizes, the higher the probability that opening the chip to reverse engineer the wafer will rip up part of the silicon you're trying to see. The most interesting pieces of an integrated circuit also tend to be thermal hotspots (i.e. the Intel CPU instruction pipeline vs the cache) which are more likely to be destroyed because they use a stronger bonding material.