Re: Are chips more vulnerable to witchcraft than transisters?

You made a grand spelling error in that sentence. It should say, "for others to use." What I see is that you are irresponsible and probably going to electrocute yourself to death. Don't play with electricity. Bad juju all around.

Master Paul, I was talking about affecting nano-thin electronics using magical power, like those Jedi mind tricks. The thinner the chip, the easier to use the Force on it, I suppose. :)

This is a CMOS chip, likely running at 3.3V, and we're watching the interface using a display program written for the OS. The prototype chip is mounted on a card, for these first runs. It's an I/O type chip full of state machines and junk. It's hard to get a handle on what it's doing when it has 4096 registers.

In software land, you have "public" and "private" parts of code, in declarations. The "public" part is what you give people as your specification. The "private" part is hidden, or at least is not accessible for any usage. It's the same with chip specs. The registers are documented, but they don't tell you how they're making coleslaw inside the chip, as that is a Trade Secret.

Paul

Silicon chips are relatively inanimate objects, at least at the moment.

If light gets to the die, they respond to that. You might remember back in the days of Byte Magazine, they were attempting to get a DRAM chip to work as a webcam (imager). And that's by focusing an image onto the DRAM cells.

When you do that, you have to know the tiling pattern of cells on the chip surface. A silicon chip may not have an orderly X*Y array on the surface, so first you have to map the address of a pixel by shining a tiny dot of light on various parts of the chip, and see what responds.

Paul

Jedi witchcraft does not need to know the tilling pattern of brain cells when you use the Force to alter the mind of a human, Master. As computer chips get thinner and narrower, they become more and more like a human brain, thus making their tilling pattern to look the same. So... maybe you don't need to use a light saber at all to slaughter drones. :)

BTW, I was talking about integrated circuits aka I.C. Are old, black I.C.s less vulnerable to wireless exploit than modern chips? Sorry, Master.

I Google-ed a bit about what you said about "tiling pattern of cells on the chip surface". So all chips are just drawing nano-fine lines on some special surfaces using special materia and light-etching machines? It's not the same as integrated circuits???

What you said is not very much from magicians drawing seals using magical wands!!! :)

魔動王 - YouTube

When you make DRAM or NAND flash, the elements have to be laid down in the X,Y direction. And they are not put in order. They're arranged to reduce electrical interference.

They don't go like this.

It's a repeating pattern. After a small patch of x,y dots, the pattern should repeat.

When you run memtest, it has some "pattern sensitivity" things it tries to do. The layout of those DRAM cells, attempts to prevent simple minded tests from finding the "sensitive" patterns.

And NAND flash does something like that too.

These things are orderly patterns, but they're arranged according to estimates of electric fields around elements, and how best to avoid spots where there would be too much interference. I have not seen any pictures presented, to demonstrate exactly what the patterns look like.

There are a number of patterns in electronics, that aren't power-of-two any more. A lot of the former concepts of "what is easy to do", have been thrown out the window.

Paul

It is a well-known fact that all electronics runs on magic smoke. The proof is that when the smoke leaks out, it stops working.

Jeroen Belleman

1. What did you mean by "magic smoke"? Electronic components are usually sealed completely. They cannot smoke like human! They don't even breathe.
2. When you said electronics, did you mean all electronic components or just chips?

I think you were talking about circuit boards (e.g. motherboard), not fabrication of chips.

more vulnerable to cosmic rays, so chips used in outer space are still running lithography of 100 nm or so

Electronic devices are allowed to smoke, under failure conditions, but they're not supposed to support an open flame.

There was one report on USENET, of an ATX supply, where a live flame shot out of the fan hole on the back of the ATX supply (the supply was running of course and the fan spinning). If the computer had been near curtains on that particular day, it could have lit the curtains on fire. For the most part, other ATX supplies do not fail exactly that way, so that one is an "anomaly".

So if I tell you "don't put the back of your PC against the curtains", that is the incident I am referring to.

Paul

Those are real, non-magical smoke, NOT "magic smnoke", as mentioned by "Jeroen Belleman"! :)

To be correct, do NOT block exhaust vent or the chimney of anything burning or heating up!! :)

If you've seen the smoke from failed chip(s), it's not exactly like other smoke. If two bus drivers (from the days of jelly bean chips) are accidentally enabled at the same time, enough power is dissipated to crack at least one of the two packages open, the die inside is piping-hot, and a thin stream of black smoke emerges.

And that counts as the magic smoke. Once the smoke escapes, the life cycle is complete. Into the waste bin they go :-)

And it is magic smoke, because the visual appearance of the smoke, is different than how other materials smoke and burn.

Paul

That's not magic smoke, just a burnt fuse made from special metal composites.

I do NOT wanna waste time & money doing burn/fry/sacred test on different chips. :)

Space objects usually have shielding against all kinds of radiations, unless... UNLESS.... you just can't. The farther away from the Earth, the lower the sheilding effect??? But BUT....

I wanna talk about witchcraft against wafers. Can tin foil do it? ;)

It's not really witchcraft like made out to be. Lasting technology uses closer to 200nm today. You can even fit a toad's eye in between it, so this is nothing shocking. Look elsewhere for magic, young Jedi. You will find it in the summer of 2026.

Affirmative, Master. :)

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@~@ Simplicity is Beauty! Remain silent! Drink, Blink, Stretch! / v \ May the Force and farces be with you! Live long and prosper!! /( _ )\

I'd say modern chips aren't any more vulnerable to witchcraft than discrete transistors—they're just a lot more sensitive to things like static electricity, noise, and power supply issues. Those tend to explain "mysterious" behavior much better than anything supernatural!