Deconstructing Complex Semiconductors, Layer by Layer

Recently, our sister company UBM TechInsights presented a Webinar on how it uncovers the secrets within semiconductors and other bits of integrated circuitry used in the devices we've come to know and love.

For those not familiar with TechInsights, it's the secret lab up in Canada where our colleagues rip open anything from cars such as the Chevy Volt to refrigerators, TVs, phones, tablets, laptops, smart meters, and more. Each dismembered product is carefully analyzed by TechInsights' engineering teams, who get to do amazingly cool things, like dissolve devices in acid to figure out what materials they're made of.

In fact, delayering semiconductor die is often useful for a plethora of applications -- circuit reverse engineering, failure analysis, transistor characteristics measurement, circuit edit, and more. Circuit extraction is likewise a good way to get valuable evidence of use in competing products that is difficult to find using other means -- so it's a patent lawyer's best friend.

TechInsights' delayering techniques involve a wide range of parameters, which include effort, equipment, cost, risk, and accuracy -- so choosing the right process, tools, and techniques is vital. It also, of course, requires sound knowledge of semiconductor architecture to sketch circuit design schematics for our readers.

Indeed, TechInsights CircuitVision goes a step further and offers a highly interactive, easy-to-navigate view into circuit designs, as well as the physical implementation on the IC. Hierarchical schematics demonstrate the design from the block down to gate level -- all linked to the original layout, showing the extracted gates and associated interconnect.

Trust me, it's neat. And not only is it neat, but for the first time ever, TechInsights is baring all with a Webinar of the delayering process, as well as the tools and expertise it uses to discover how a processor was designed, formulated, and built -- after it was actually delivered to market.

You can see the free presentation here (just fill out the short form prior to downloading). Warning: this presentation has a heavy geek factor!

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This story was originally posted by EE Times.

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