Comment by Joel_Mckay
8 hours ago
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
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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