Hacker News
points by josh-wrale 11 hours ago | 0 comments
Have people tried training models to decode these photographs into code?
[–] amelius 11 hours ago
How would you do that if there's like 60 layers of metal conductors over the silicon substrate?
[–] josh-wrale 11 hours ago
Fair. I guess it would be necessary to CT scan them, like the Vesuvius Challenge
[–] dgfl 10 hours ago
Not sure if regular tomography would work, but this has been done at high enough resolution with some fancier techniques (ptychography): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07615-6

I would imagine this is of decent interest to people reverse engineering chip designs, or doing failure analysis, so it’s possible someone might actually be trying this at scale.

[–] Arubis 7 hours ago
You can destructively deprocess dies, removing a layer at a time and imaging at each layer. 20ish years ago you could still do this with a polishing wheel and a fine slurry; don’t know if that’s still viable.
[–] throwaway198846 11 hours ago
Computer, enhance!
[–] kkotak 10 hours ago
We need two people on the keyboard at the same time to enahnce.
[–] elictronic 10 hours ago
It’s like taking a picture of someone’s house to determine their current medical diagnosis.

Garbage in, it’ Herpes.

[–] giancarlostoro 10 hours ago
Could have just said to determine where all the pipes are but you know, you could go all the way to herpes I suppose… :)