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Comment by Joel_Mckay | Hacker News Reader

Practically No, the stack-up of metal layers often hides the gate structures underneath, and the billions of process cells may not all be the same.

Theoretically Yes, as an ion-beam-mill and electron-microscope combination machine can slice up semiconductors layer-by-layer. Given these machines can often also give precise x-ray analysis material data, the exact makeup of the chip can be extracted by competitors given enough time. =3

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> Theoretically Yes, as an ion-beam-mill and electron-microscope combination machine can slice up semiconductors layer-by-layer.

You may not even need anything as fancy as that - many microchips can be delayered by a skilled operator using mechanical polishing processes.

Now you're making me imagine some kind of 3D-scanning, confocal x-ray fluorescent spectroscope.

Or maybe some kind of hybrid of x-ray microtomography and spectroscopic analysis all in one.

But, maybe the energies involved would be about the same destructive power as some microtome slicing technique...

We already know that X-rays don't destroy chips.

I was thinking of the kind of high-energy photon sources that sprawl across a large laboratory campus behind rings of security fences.

These things can definitely erode the targets. Tomography experiments have to think carefully to optimize the set exposure angles used during a session, because the target degrades more with each shot.

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