reverse engineering DeCaps
posted on
Oct 03, 2010 11:56AM
PTSC 8-K sub doc 3 (filed 6/15/05)
3.6 Upon the termination of this Commercialization Agreement, Patriot
shall be entitled to receive a copy of third party "DeCaps" (as such term is
commonly understood to mean in the industry) related to the Commercialization
and third party expert analyses thereof; and TPL does hereby consent to the
deliveries thereof by such third party experts. In the event any of the
foregoing are not provided by such third parties, TPL will provide Patriot with
copies of such documents in its possession. In addition, a Patriot
Representative shall be entitled to view such "DeCaps" on a quarterly basis, but
shall not be entitled to make copies thereof. With the exception of TPL's
obligations pursuant to Section 3.1 and this Section 3.6, TPL shall not be
obligated to share any other materials related to the Commercialization,
including without limitation any attorney work product generated during the term
of this Commercialization Agreement or thereafter, which for all intents and
purposes shall be deemed to be privileged, proprietary and exclusive to TPL.
Reverse Engineering
http://www.edn.com/article/457681-IC_reverse_engineering_a_design_team_perspective.php
The IC Insider explains the why and how of circuit extraction of semiconductor chips.
By Randy Torrance and Dick James, Chipworks -- EDN, March 11, 2010
It has been quite a bit of fun writing these IC Insider columns over the last year. Concurrently, one of us, Randy Torrance, has been invited to speak at three IEEE chapters on the "the state of the art in reverse engineering." Given the interest, we thought that we would depart from the usual device-centric article and tell you a bit about how circuit reverse engineering is done.
One of the most basic business requirements is the need to know what the competition is doing. This starts with tracking news releases, financial filings, and win/loss reports from the sales team. But on a product level, the engineering teams often need more detail to help make design and manufacturing decisions that can reduce engineering effort and deliver market-winning specifications. This analysis inevitably starts with a basic teardown of electronics devices like mobile phones or computers. For a semiconductor company, the process very commonly includes decapsulating a die from its package and looking at it under the microscope to do basic benchmarking of die size and functional block layout. It is this latter type of analysis that typically is called RE (reverse engineering).
In the semiconductor industry, RE has long been a recognized and well used part of competitive intelligence. It's commonly leveraged to both benchmark products and support patent licensing activities (by evidence that proves infringement or prior art). Advances in semiconductor technology, specifically the massive integration of billions of individual devices and masses of functions into single components, have caused RE to evolve from skunk-works projects in the failure-analysis lab into a specialized niche of the engineering profession.