DARPA Technology Could Uncover Counterfeit Microchips

coondoggie writes The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said this week one of its contractors, working on one of the agency's anti-counterfeit projects has developed and deployed what it calls an Advanced Scanning Optical Microscope that can scan integrated circuits by using an extremely narrow infrared laser beam, to probe microelectronic circuits at nanometer levels, revealing information about chip construction as well as the function of circuits at the transistor level.

Comments

This tool needs to hit the market asap.

[Grog6]

I have had numerous problems with counterfeit transistors and Zener diodes.

How can you profitably screen thousands of rectifier diodes for their zener point, then grind off the original markings, and mold on new partnumbers??

At $0.003 each?

At least the transistors failed spectacularly. :)

Define "counterfeit"

[retroworks]

Most of the accused "counterfeit" chips I've read about aren't "counterfeit" at all. They are used, secondary market, chips harvested from used boards. The "infamous Guiyu" of China e-waste fame is a hub where workers cut out individual microprocessors and chips from boards and repurpose them. The general term in the industry is "gray market"... gray because it's not purely black market, and because of the difficulty in distinguishing what the illegality is when a Chinese factory has substituted a working used part for an OEM part.

Counterfeiting? Or...?

[blackiner]

I am no engineer or scientist, but are these precise enough to be used to extract hw encryption keys? Because if so, I think I can guess the real purpose for developing these.

Re:Question from the lawn

[petermgreen]

The problem is testing "every possible op code" is insufficiant, you would have to test every possible opcode/operand/register state combination since the condition for "evil behviour" may test on a tight combination of those. Doing so is compututationally infeasible.