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Reverse Engineering Laboratory

The Reverse Engineering Laboratory is not only an essential service to verify, understand, tune and improve the different fabrication processes from the IMB-CNM's clean room, but can also offer its capabilities to external research centers and companies.

IMB-CNM's Reverse Engineering experts have deep knowledge in semiconductor technology, fabrication processes and IC design, which combined with the acces to the high-end IMB-CNM’s Clean Room equipment, allows us to offer a wide range of in-chip analysis related services, including:

  • Patent protection
  1. Our laboratory has proven experience in the field, and can help the industry with advice, investigation and legal assesment on circuit layout and other IP patent infringements.
  • Failure analysis
  1. Finding why an integrated circuit simply does not work or fails to meet the expected specifications can be a tedious work but is crucial in order to improve the fabrication procedure, increase yield, robustness and avoid costly mass failures when products are already on the market. The Reverse Engineering laboratory has vast experience in explaining the IC failure modes, finding the fail mechanism and its root cause.
  2. Security audits
  3. Nowadays, almost every electronic device carries inside a microprocessor capable to store information, sometimes private or sensitive. Although every chip has some sort of protecion from malicius attacks, it is only matter of time and money for a skilled hacker to retrieve the stored data. Our experts can determine how secure is your integrated circuit and which are its main vulnerabilities.
  • IC Reverse Engineering works
  1. Complementary to the other services, IC reverse engineering is a complex task that involves not only high-end equipment but also a deep transversal knowlegde on semiconductor physics, device fabrication and circuit design. Our laboratory can offer different IC reversing services such as:
     
  2. Technological analysis
  3. Knowing how a circuit is fabricated, which materials contains, how many layers and how thick they are, or the shape and depth of its diffusions, can be a very useful information for competitive analysis, patent infringement assesments or simply to know how well your simulated process matches the actual fabrication.
     
  4. Digital circuitry extraction
  5. Used mainly for patent protection and security analysis, reversing digital circuits is a laborious task that pushes engineers' skills and machine capabilities to their limits. We are able to deprocesses the chip, image every layer and thanks to an advanced software we customly created for this puropse, extract a working netlist of your circuit ready for electrical and logic simulation.
     
  6. Analog circuitry extraction
  7. Opposite to the digital reverse engineering, very few labs worlwide are able to offer the same solution for analog circuits. The strong analog design background of our experts allows us to offer this exclusive service, that can help companies replacing obsolete (and undocumented) parts in their designs, asses patent infringements or simply do a competence analysis.

Equipment available

  • Chemical Fume hood
  1. sink
  2. hot plate with stirrer
  3. ultrasound bath
  • Allied MultiPrep™ System precision polisher
  • Leco VP-150 grinder/polisher
  • Presi Poly’vac vacuum impregnation system
  • Precision Scale
  • Leco VC50 diamond saw
  • Nikon SMX1500 stereomicroscope
  • Nikon Eclipse ME600 microscope (5x-100x) with polarizer
  • Karl Süss PM8 probe station
  1. YAG edition laser
  • Leica AC600 carbon coater
  • Voltera V-one PCB prototyper

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