After I wrote that, I thought it is appropriate to expand my comment a little.
Modern silicon wafers are huge: 300 millimeters, or about 1 foot in diameter.
That's far larger than the 4-inch diameter that was common in 1980-2, when I
worked at Intel. Wafers can have a problem, referred to as "potato-chipping".
https://semiaccurate.com/2015/05/18/disco-makes-hexagonal-non-regular-chips-possible/
It's difficult to lithograph semiconductor patterns on a wafer if this
potato-chipping occurs. So, the wafer must be physically thicker than they
might otherwise like. But when the lithographic and other steps are completed,
the chips might be far thicker than they'd like to package, Generally, the
solution is called "back-grinding", and involves simply grinding the back side
of the wafer to whatever thickness they actually want the chips to be. Then,
they plate on a thin layer of metal, designed to allow the chips to be
soldered/brazed to a metal plate, and dice the thinned chips and bond them to a
metal backing.
However, none of this explains the statement below that the chip's 'thin-ness'
somehow reduces security.
Jim Bell
On Sunday, October 6, 2019, 11:03:45 AM PDT, jim bell <[email protected]>
wrote:
I don't know what they mean by "thin". The article says:
"As CPUs are being made with thinner materials, this is creating attack vectors
for side-channel attacks, according to a report from Semiconductor Engineering
this week. The noise and electromagnetic radiation emitted by the thinner chips
has become increasingly easier to observe by attackers, allowing for better
penetration from methods used to steal chips' encryption keys and IP."
"The report cites U.S. Department of Defense agency DARPA, Synopsys (which
makes tools for silicon chip design, verification and more), Ansys (which makes
engineering simulation software), Siemens and more. It details how
semiconductors are becoming more vulnerable to security threats with "each new
process node," thanks to thinner dies and insulation layers."
This simply doesn't make sense to me. The chips themselves aren't doing much
radiating of an rf signal, the wires connecting them to the rest of the world
are guilty of that.
Jim Bell
On Sunday, October 6, 2019, 09:20:49 AM PDT, Steven Schear
<[email protected]> wrote:
When it comes to semiconductors perhaps thin should not be "in".
On Sun, Oct 6, 2019, 5:13 AM jim bell <[email protected]> wrote:
Tom's Hardware: As CPU Materials Get Thinner, Security Risks Grow - Report.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cpu-thin-materials-security-risk-silicon,40554.html
