Cloning whole chip is probably economically not viable, but definitely possible (it's cheaper to design from scratch with modern automatic design tools), but retrieving secret keys is a popular task.
For a company having all the tools (electron microscope with bells and whistles, polishing machines, microprobes) it might take hundreds to thousands of human-hours (0.1-1+ million $).
Is there any chance such machines will be available to hobbyists some day? The only person I've ever seen attempt something like this is Sam Zeloof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrEC2LGGXn0 I'm wondering if we'll get to the point where a single person can manufacture a chip.
It could conceivably be done even below the schematic level, though I'm not sure how much room modern processes have for this sort of thing now that we're talking about how many atoms wide a transistor is. I've been told that there was a period of a few years in which a kind of "copy protection" proliferated in IC layouts. The layouts would be tweaked to exploit quirks of the originating company's fabrication process (e.g. a pattern might look like a diode but actually function as a resistor when fabricated), and this would sabotage attempts by other companies to clone the chip (at the time, Japanese and Soviet clones were major concerns).
Can you even vet it, really? All you need is one chip with secret logic inside it, in just a handful of boards, and you are hosed. You'd have to physically inspect every single board, in every single piece of equipment, and even then that's not 100%. Often these devices look completely different inside from lot to lot, due to the way component sourcing works.
I've heard people have decapped these and even recreated (in some fashion) versions of the masks, or circuit layouts. I'd love to figure out how to start a project making actual chips.
Worse case, you disassemble the die and read the bits off with an electron microscope. It's still possible, just expensive, painful, and maybe dangerous if you damage the chip.
I don't know anything about chip design and manufacturing, so I might be way off, but could you just send working Commodore chips to China, and have someone make a clone. It seems like replicating 25+ year old chip technology should be easy enough, or are there simply no plants left that can create compatible chips?
Depends on where the chip is and what it did. It's possible to hide chips between layers, hide chips under chips, replace an existing chip with something that looks almost just like it with additional functions.
It's really not hard to imagine some smart people being told to make it work.
It would seem exceedingly difficult to reuse chips at scale. The software and pcb is deigned around one microcontroller in particular and it is not trivial to swap them out with others.
So if I design my washing machine around a particular chip, I could order a million of them for 5 cent each, or I would have to:
* somehow identify other models which have the chip
* find 1 million of them about to be discarded
* rip them open, desolder, collect these parts
* discard the rest of the machine
* do this for about 10 cents per washing machine
combined with the fact that washing machines usually last a decade and will be dying out over a time period spread out over 10-20 years after manufacturing time. How on earth would it be possible to pull off and by that time, these chips will be very obsolete / impossible to order new ones.
The die design tells what parts are there, not their values or characteristics; cloning a chip just by looking at the die would require a lot more research.
Can you make it from raw silicon via CMP or MOSIS? It seems like a pricey hobby (probably you'll be out US$20k before you have a working chip) but not in the same league of costliness as antique cars or art collecting.
I wonder if you could fuzz a chip directly, without having the schematics, so that if the manufacturer inserts something off-the-books it still gets explored.
After I been watching a ton of videos about retro-computing, mostly C64 and Amiga, I've been wondering if it would be possible to remake the custom Commodore/MOS chips. You can't get the original schematic and masks obviously, but the chips are pretty big by modern standards. Surely you could send a functional chip to China and have it reverse engineered.
You also don't need 5nm processing nodes to remake them, even a 130nm would be an improvement, and I have the feeling that even on 40nm there would be ample fabs able to make them.
It's probably more difficult than I imagine, and less efficient than just replacing the whole system with a FPGA.
If i correctly understand what you are saying, it cold pe possible to make a custom small chip for doing some crypto capable of a little more than what those smartcards offer for under 10k$? That would be awesome, from a trust perspective, at least if you could realistically compare the chip you get back with what you know to expect, using an electron microscope.
People do reverse engineer chips by photographing them. https://youtu.be/aHx-XUA6f9g (Reading Silicon: How to Reverse Engineer Integrated Circuits). But as far as I know, the same cannot be done with the brains even if we can photograph it. I guess the 3D structure of the brain compounded with high interconnection between neurons does not make it easy.
Cloning whole chip is probably economically not viable, but definitely possible (it's cheaper to design from scratch with modern automatic design tools), but retrieving secret keys is a popular task.
For a company having all the tools (electron microscope with bells and whistles, polishing machines, microprobes) it might take hundreds to thousands of human-hours (0.1-1+ million $).
Companies like http://www.chipworks.com/ can do that, if your request is legal.
reply