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an established international industry.
The copying process begins by
stripping all the parts off the board
to identify parts. The PCBs can then
be delaminated into their individual
layers and imaged in order to
reconstruct a schematic diagram of
the board. This reverse engineering
industry also includes companies that
offer to extract the code from your
microcontrollers; so not even the
firmware running on the boards is
safe from cloning.
ASICs, at least modern ones, turn out
to be your best safeguard
These issues have led technology
companies to revert to ASICs
(Application Specific Integrated
Circuits) as a means of physically
implementing and protecting their IP.
But in older IC technologies, meaning
those with one or two metal layers
and 1um-2um critical dimensions, this
still didn’t prove secure. After package
removal (also known as “depotting”)
all features could easily be seen using
optical imaging equipment to take
high resolution images. The cloning
process could then proceed using
similar methods as PCB cloning.
With more recent foundry fabrication
technologies using critical dimensions
of 180nm and less, this is much, much
more difficult. This is not only due to
the difficulties of imaging these sub-
wavelength dimensions using optical,
Number of ASIC projects as a function of technology
node. Source imec IC-link database.
wide-field microscopes, there are also
many more metal interconnect layers,
larger numbers of logics gates, plus
analog blocks, Radio Frequency (RF)
blocks, memory, MEMs, inductors and
other devices integrated on-chip. All
these factors combine to make ASIC
cloning extremely time consuming
and ultimately uneconomic for all but
the biggest companies.
A typical example of a fast-innovating
technology company is Belgium-
based Van de Wiele, a global leader in
advanced equipment and specialized
services for the textile manufacturing
industry. Van de Wiele has repeatedly
suffered from reverse engineering
of the boards used to control yarn
systems. R&D manager Hans Desmet
admits that “the first machine we
released that used ASIC controllers
was the first one that was not copied”.
The IoT offers a huge opportunity for
nimble, fast-moving innovation
The accelerating trend of technology
innovators to use ASICs for IP
protection has been driven by the
recent confluence of three key drivers.
First, there has been an explosion
in applications for what has been
loosely grouped under the heading
of the Internet of Things (IoT). This
has enabled companies with leaner
decision making cycles and closer
connections to the latest trends to
move more rapidly to market than
larger companies.
Second, while the volume of chips
needed to address the IoT market
is huge, the fragmentation of the
market into a large number of
potential IoT applications means
that the production volumes of
individual designs will be relatively
small. This makes it difficult for large
companies to compete on their ability
to ramp large production volumes.
In many ways large companies have
outsourced innovation to technology
SMEs.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly,
one of the key characteristics of
IoT applications is that they require
advanced but not necessarily leading-
edge silicon technology. This is
primarily due to the fact that some
form of wireless communication
is required and the corresponding
36 l New-Tech Magazine Europe