New-Tech Europe Magazine | May 2016

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

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