This press release is copyrighted by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE). Its use is granted only to journalists and news media.
Reverse engineering--taking apart products to figure out how they work--was once a much-maligned practice among semiconductor engineers. And with good reason: back in the 1960s and 70s, unscrupulous companies used it to illegally clone computer chips. These days, though, the technique is being revived for legitimate, and profitable, ends. Reverse engineering's new uses include providing technical ammunition for intellectual property negotiations, letting chip-makers know how their goods stack up against the competition, and pinpointing why products fail.
Teasing out the inner workings of today's integrated circuits--with their ever shrinking geometries and increasing complexity--demands precision and state-of-the-art tools. But, as Jean Kumagai describes in the November issue of IEEE Spectrum, the handful of labs that specialize in reverse chip engineering are well able to dissect all the latest memory and logic devices, as well as smart cards, cell phones, and electronic toys. Recently, one reverse engineering lab even rebuilt a badly corroded memory chip from the flight controller of Swissair 111.
Contact: Jean Kumagai, 212 419 7551, [email protected].For faxed copies of the complete article ["Chip detectives," by Jean Kumagai, Senior Associate Editor, IEEE Spectrum, November 2000, pp. 43-48] or to arrange an interview, contact: Nancy T. Hantman, 212 419 7561, [email protected].
URL: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org
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