Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "The US Military's Semiconductor Buying Problem" video.

  1. A final vulnerability: Reverse engineering chips is an industry, and a highly automated one to boot. Shops take the chips, depackage them, then put them in etch baths and take progressive digital images as the layers come off, then use software to reverse the circuitry. And we'll call it "scotts law", you can create an RE shop for a fraction of the expense of creating a fab. There is a whole section of Silicon Valley devoted to just that.
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  2.  @bunyu6237  I think others would supply better info than I on this subject, since I haven't been in the IC industry for decades, back in the late 1980's. At that time, the industry (reverse engineering) was moving from hand reversing to fully automated reversing. However, if you don't mind speculation, I would say there is no concrete reason why the reversing industry would not have kept up with newer geometries. The only real change would have been that its basically not possible to manually reverse these chips anymore. I personally worked on reversing a chip at about 4 generations beyond the Z80, which was not that much. At that time, blowing up a chip to the size of a ping-pong table was enough to allow you to see and reverse engineer individual transistors and connections. Having said that, I have very mixed feelings about the entire process. I don't feel it is right to go about copying others designs. I was told at the time that the purpose was to ensure compatibility, but the company later changed their story. On the plus side, it was an amazing way for me to get onboard the IC industry. There is nothing like reverse engineering a chip to give you a deep understanding of it. However, I would say I think I would refuse to do it today, or at least try to steer towards another job. For anyone who cares about why I have a relationship to any of this, I used to try and stay with equal parts of software and hardware. This was always a difficult proposition, and it became easier and more rewarding financially to stay on the software side only, which is that I do today. However, my brush with the IC industry made a huge impression on me, and still shapes a lot of what I do. For example, a lot of my work deals with SOCs, and I am part of a subset of software developers who understand SOC software design.
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  3.  @harrickvharrick3957  The technique is to remove the passivation on the chip (top level of glass), then use a scanning electron microscope to read the values of memory cells and other elements on the chip. They use this to perform live debugging on chips as well. I have seen it in action. The operator can literally tell the machine what trace to watch, then it outputs a scope trace as if you had probed it. Its very impressive and very expensive technology. The simple answer is there is nothing that cannot be REed with effort.
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  4. I feel like I should wrap this subject with an opine on reverse engineering (RE) in general. IMHO this tends to be a glint in the eye mainly of incompetent engineers and managers who like the idea of cutting engineers out of the process. Engineers are troublesome little critters who bitch a lot and eventually discover the joys of sex and the consequent burdens of children. I have always found that it is easier to create software/hardware designs from scratch than to copy the work of others, since REing others work makes it harder and also because the state of software design today is typically crappy, poorly documented code. I often do scratch designs even when given others' source code. REing a chip just gives you a fat binder of schematics (probably a lot of fat binders nowadays). It does not give you the design of the chip, and the design processes of the chip are farther than ever from the schematic thanks to the size of the designs and the fact most of it is done in Verilog. I'm willing to bet most RE today is done by silicon makers wanting to figure out how that new stacked DRAM cell works.
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  5.  @bunyu6237  A couple of reasons (better software than hardware). First of all, there is a larger group of people working on software than hardware, so the jobs are more plentiful and the demand greater. Second, hardware/software crossover people are considered odd birds, and when I used to do that I had people literally telling me to "pick a side", go one way or the other. I find it easier to get and do software projects, and the pay is better. I dabbled in Verilog long after I stopped being paid for hardware design, and I realized it would take a lot of work to get a foothold in good Verilog design with virtually no corresponding increase in salary, and more likely a decrease for a while during the time I gain credibility as a Verilog designer. The last time I was paid to design hardware it was still schematic entry (and yes, in case you haven't figured that out, I am indeed that old). Of course, a lot of this is my personal situation. I am not sure any of the above would serve as career advice. I definitely consider my hardware background to be a career asset, since specialize low level software design (drivers, embedded, etc). Having said that, I keep up with hardware advances and have often dreamed of uniting my Verilog experience with software experience. That dream is unrealized.
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  6. Going to be a party when you cross 100k!
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