ICs & Semiconductors

Taking security to the max

C

Mike Ward explains how laser ablation can be used to help put you on the road to safety against copy-cat designs and prudent production quality control

opy-cat designs are the ‘highway robbery’ of the current global manufacturing age. It may no

longer be a case of “stand and deliver” as victims hand over their jewels to an armed brigand, but it might as well be, when your intellectual property has been ripped off and you see imitation electronics entering the marketplace that on first inspection looks exactly the same as yours! Imitation is absolutely not the

highest form of flattery, when you’ve put in the hours, found the inspiration and invested heavily in a genuinely new or advanced hardware designs, and an electronic system producer with no scruples selects your design and programming to copy and slip into the distribution channel. It’s an obvious case of unethical reverse engineering. According to some estimates, legitimate manufacturers and mainstream brands are losing up to $100 billion a year in lost revenues. Given the huge levels of electronics

manufacturing found in Asia, and despite an ensemble of anti- counterfeiting laws and some highly publicised raids on electronics counterfeiters from time to time, the sheer volume we are talking about, means that most counterfeiters never get caught.

This is not an exclusively Asia-Pacific

pastime to be fair, and goes on here in the UK and indeed across the world. But given the sheer scale of the burgeoning manufacturing industries overseas and the continued cost differentials of mass producing goods for Western markets in the China, the Far East takes first and second place on the IP-fraud podium.

Moving up to mass production

Let’s take a look at a scenario that’s not uncommon for engineers and directors today. You’ve developed a new product solution with some pretty nifty programming behind it. The pilot study has proved more successful than your conservative predictions had imagined and the day has come to explore your mass production options. UK and European ‘known players’ come in at a safe but ‘margin-eroding’ price per unit and you know you are about to walk into the unknown. You need to find a safe ‘margin-protecting’ price per unit but you reckon this will only likely to be found in the Far East. Critically, you need to ensure you have solid design protection in place. Take a deep breath and pause just

there. Are you able to verify the integrity and quality regime of the overseas manufacturer with a local trusted partner? If you can’t, then it may well be advisable to work with a UK company with a long-standing foothold in the region or an excellent cost/supply base, or ideally both! You may be back to margin issues

again, but there is always the safest (in our opinion) option of all, and that is

Figure 1. Laser Ablation

to programme all the semiconductors safely here and remove all identifiable markings from them, so that when shipped abroad, no ‘Johnnie-come lately’ counterfeiter can figure out which chip was used and get into counterfeit production. So how can British companies and

specifically British design engineers best protect their intellectual property?

Laser ablation

At Lewmax Programming, home to some highly advanced home-grown robotics, we invested two years of intensive R&D, in partnership with laser manufacturers, working

with high powered hyper-precision lasers to bolt onto our fast-running programming production lines. The incredibly satisfying result was and is a set of bespoke laser systems that completely removes all evidence of original component device markings and/or numbers. The term for this process is Laser Ablation as featured in Figure 1.

26 April 2010

Components in Electronics

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