Tom's Hardware: As CPU Materials Get Thinner, Security Risks Grow - Report

[jim bell]

 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 <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> 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 <schear.steve at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 When it comes to semiconductors perhaps thin should not be "in".

On Sun, Oct 6, 2019, 5:13 AM jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> 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

    
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