Silicon Fault Analysis (FA) equipment for security analysis

Jean-Pierre Seifert   - TU Berlin, DE

Even silicon design & production is plagued by finding tiniest bugs/errors/faults arising from design or production failures in the huge and complex silicon graveyard of highest complexity in the nanometer regime. This field is known as Physical (Silicon) Debug or Failure Analysis, and it has its own research and development agenda. The respective FA equipment is also known as capital equipment as it comes at extreme cost and requires highly skilled operators, so called FA engineers. As FA equipment enables contactless probing of latest nanometer transistors at any given speed, its connection to hw security is obvious. This lecture will present three different FA technologies and point out their relationship to hw security: Hamamatsu Phemos, eBeam backside probing, and lock-in thermography.