12/12/2023 0 Comments Cpu transistor under microscopeThrough a technique called X-ray ptychography, the researchers could point the beam at their sample from a number of different angles and use the resulting diffraction patterns to reconstruct chip’s internal structure. The various circuit components-its copper wires and silicon transistors, for example-scatter the light in different ways and cause constructive and destructive interference. To produce a 3D rendering of the Intel chip-an Intel G3260 processor-the team shined an X-ray beam through a portion of the chip. The facility is a synchrotron it accelerates electrons that are moving close to the speed of light in order to generate beams of X-rays. The work, which was published this week in the journal Nature, was conducted at the Paul Scherrer Institute’s Swiss Light Source. One of those is verifying that a chip only has the features it is intended to have, and that a “ hardware Trojan”-added circuitry that could be used for malicious purposes-hasn’t been introduced. This is going to force a rethink of what computing is”, he says, and what it means for a company to add value in the computing industry.Įven if this approach isn’t widely adopted to tear down competitors’ chips, it could find a use in other applications. “Total transparency in chip manufacturing is on the horizon. īut “all it takes is a few more years of this kind of work, and you'll pop in your chip and out comes the schematic,” says Anthony Levi of the University of Southern California. Today, reverse engineering outfits progressively remove layers of a processor and take electron microscope images of one small patch of the chip at a time. The technique is a significant departure from the way the chip industry currently looks inside finished chips, in order to reverse engineer them or check that their own intellectual property hasn’t been misused. In the future, the team says, this imaging technique could be extended to create high-resolution, large-scale images of the interiors of chips. They pointed a beam of X-rays at a piece of an Intel processor and were able to reconstruct the chip’s warren of transistors and wiring in three dimensions. A team of researchers based in Switzerland is on the way to laying bare much of the secret technology inside commercial processors.
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