Some of the best insights have emerged out of a little Ottawa outfit called TechInsights, which managed to quickly get their hands on a phone and scrutinize its guts. The Tech 202 caught up withwho shared some of the ins and outs of their work as chip detectives.To confirm the provenance of a chip, Hutcheson said the group acts like art experts authenticating a recently discovered painting.
But to see such detail requires very high magnification — a scanning electron microscope. “We have some equipment that can see the individual molecules,” Hutcheson said. “It’s really cool.” SMIC has been under U.S. Commerce Department export restrictions since December 2020, which theoretically should have blocked it from accessing U.S. equipment for making chips smaller than 10-nanometer. Thus beganHutcheson said they can’t determine what brands of chipmaking tools were used just by looking at the chip.