A joint technical talk

Sponsored by

IET Ottawa Chapter

IEEE EDS/CAS/SSCS Ottawa Chapter

IEEE Ottawa Section

Title

Reverse Engineering in the Semiconductor Industry

Speakers

Randy Torrance, B.A.Sc.E.E.,M.A.Sc.E.E.

Dick James, B.Sc, M.Sc  (Chipworks)

Abstract

The continuous shrinking of feature size to increase the integration level of silicon chips has presented major challenges to the reverse engineer, obsolescing simple teardowns and demanding the adoption of new and more sophisticated technology to analyze chips. The following types of analysis will be covered in detail:

·                 product teardown;

·                 techniques used for system-level analysis, both hardware and software;

·                 circuit extraction, taking the chip down to the transistor level and working back up through the interconnects to create schematics;

·                 process analysis, looking at how the chip is made, and what it is made of.

This presentation is an update of an invited paper given at the 2007 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) with more focus on circuit extraction and cross-referencing between circuit schematics and the 1000's of physical layout images obtained through generating a mosaic of scanning electron microscopy across all device layers.

Biographies

Randy Torrance leads the Circuit Analysis team for the Technical Intelligence group at Chipworks. During Randy's 22 years in the technology industry he has held senior technical and management positions in the IC design and electronic systems areas.

Prior to joining Chipworks Randy was Director of IC Technology Development for Atmos/Mosys, and was responsible for teams designing cutting-edge embedded memory macros. Before that he spent 12 years at Mosaid, where he held positions ranging from Senior Design Engineer through Manager IC Design to Director of IC Design, Switching Products. Here he led groups designing commodity and custom memories, and large ASICs for the graphics and networking markets.

Randy holds a B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

Dick James is a veteran of the semiconductor industry and the senior technology analyst for Chipworks.

Dick graduated in 1971 with a Masters degree in Microelectronics and Semiconductor Devices from the University of Southampton in England, after gaining a B.Sc in Applied Chemistry from the University of Salford.   He has spent over 35 years working in the process development, design, manufacturing, packaging and reverse engineering of semiconductor devices.

He joined the Chipworks team in March 1995 and in his role as Senior Technology Analyst acts as an internal and external consultant to Chipworks staff and customers, dealing with the microstructural characterization of devices, both process and package analyses, and more recently has become a speaker at technical conferences and regularly published technical author, with a column on the Semiconductor International website, and prior to that in Solid State Technology magazine and articles in other publications.

He is a member of the IEEE, the Electrochemical Society, and the Ottawa Sommelier Guild.