Chapter 852 cannot be copied (today is still 4k, tomorrow will resume three chapters a day)

Not to mention that the Russians are fast at grinding chips, even the Gauls are quite fast.

After the programmable switching system arrived, they went through a process similar to that of the Russians, and suddenly discovered that they still had to polish the chips, and they had to pick out the most important ones from a pile of cow dung or several piles of dung to polish.

Fortunately, this is not very difficult for the Gauls either. They have already locked down some of the most suspicious chips through device location, circuit direction and wiring type.

"Merde!"

A Gaul who was working on the polishing operation cursed and stopped working.

The Gaul next to him leaned forward.

"Matthew, what happened?"

Matthew pointed his finger at the epoxy resin he was polishing and said, "Look at this. I have a bad feeling about this."

He gently wiped the epoxy resin with his hand, which still had some gray powder from grinding off. The surface of the resin immediately turned black and clean. On the surface where a layer was polished off, some golden threads and broken edges began to appear on it. From the parts that could be seen, it could even be guessed that they were widely distributed, basically everywhere in this block of epoxy resin.

"What is this?" asked another person.

Matthew groaned, "It should be enameled wire. Why would they mix this stuff into the epoxy resin?"

"To enhance the structural strength?" This is a barely plausible guess.

Just like reinforced concrete, or even high-strength steel-concrete that has iron nails mixed into the concrete in addition to the steel bars, this method of adding wires to the resin should theoretically contribute to the strength.

"No, no, no..." Matthew kept shaking his head. "For the working environment required by this kind of equipment, the strength of epoxy resin is completely sufficient and does not require any reinforcement. And even if you want to strengthen it, there are other ways to do it. There is no need to use such a troublesome method."

"What could be the reason?" His colleague also became puzzled.

"Oh no! I hope it's not what I think." Matthew picked up the meter and began to measure the continuity between the broken ends of the wires and the positive pole of the power input.

“Beep...beep..." The sound of the instrument made Matthew's heart sink to the bottom.

It works!

Matthew, who was proficient in circuits, immediately understood that the Orientals had buried the power supply lines of the chip in the epoxy resin outside the chip, surrounding the chip tightly!
In this case, if you want to see the chip, you must cut off these wires, but once these wires are cut, the consequences are self-evident. You must know that most of these are RAM chips that are volatile when power is off. Once the power is off, it means that the data inside is lost.

His only hope now is that this chip is a decoding circuit. There is no data in it, but only solidified decoding logic. In this way, the integrity of the data will not be destroyed.

Thinking of this, he picked up the instrument, adjusted the gear, and began to test the power supply of each chip. Compared with other functional pins, the power supply pin is relatively easy to find. At this time, they have determined the positive power supply pole and ground wire of these cow dung chips.

The test results made him feel as if his heart had sunk into an icy cave - almost every chip had lost power, which meant that for RAM chips that needed batteries to maintain power, all the programs and data inside were destroyed.

Good news - the piece that was worn away is indeed a decoding circuit.

Bad news - this decoding circuit is almost the beginning of the power bus!
The power supply of almost all RAM chips is connected in series to the power bus at the back. If the power supply of this chip is cut off, it means that the data of all RAM chips will be lost.

"Cunning Oriental!!!!" Matthew roared angrily.

"Matthew, don't worry, things are not that bad." His colleague hurried to comfort him.

"Isn't this bad enough?" Matthew was very discouraged.

"Yes, this set is definitely useless, but at least we can completely disassemble it without any scruples. After we figure out its structure, we can deal with the remaining set, right? Don't forget, what we want is the mapping relationship of out-of-order addressing, which is solidified in the logic circuit chip and will not be affected by power failure. As long as we can find this relationship, we can read the data correctly from the other set. It may take a lot of time, but at least we are not desperate."

Matthew started to come out of his depression a little. What his colleague said made sense, but he always felt that this matter might not be that simple.

"I always feel that Orientals may not be as simple as you think...at least judging from the anti-theft methods we have known before." Matthew muttered.

If they had communicated with the Russians, they would immediately answer their questions. Gao Zhendong's method was indeed not that simple.

Because the Russians received the goods earlier than them, their progress was naturally faster than theirs, and they discovered the despairing fact earlier.

"Sukabulie! Their address mapping circuit is not a logic circuit at all!" Anatoly let out a shocking roar.

"What are you talking about?" Vitali asked.

"I have polished the address mapping chip in this scrapped memory module. It is a computer! A single-chip microcomputer! Their address mapping is out of order. It is not logic at all. It is processed by the single-chip microcomputer according to the program in the single-chip microcomputer."

Vitali was a little puzzled: "Isn't this a good thing, my Davari? In this case, you only need to take out the address mapping program, and you can read all the programs and data on another intact machine."

"Impossible, Vitali. They are using a single-chip microcomputer! And it is a special single-chip microcomputer. From the structural point of view, there is no external memory. They wrote the mapping program in the power-off volatile RAM inside the single-chip microcomputer. After the power is off, even the mapping program will be lost! This structure is completely closed in the single-chip microcomputer, so we have no way to obtain any data and programs in the single-chip microcomputer!"

This was Gao Zhendong's dirty trick. This special single-chip microcomputer was produced on the small integrated circuit production line of the third factory. Its only purpose was to prevent people from easily obtaining any data inside it.

This type of microcontroller does not communicate with the outside world at all except for the functional instructions that need to be executed. In fact, except for the necessary functional interfaces, there are no other interfaces, which means that there is no way to read the data and programs inside.

The use of on-chip volatile RAM instead of program memory further increases the difficulty of reading.

If the power goes out, there will be nothing. Unfortunately, if the power supply line of this thing is not worn out, you can't see the microcontroller itself at all. Even if you have the ability to carve on the chip, it is difficult to contact the chip itself without destroying the program and data, and further work is even more difficult.

Vitali is also an expert in computers, and he is not helpless in this regard. "Then can we solve the power supply problem first, such as using chemical means to dissolve or physical means to remove the epoxy resin, and read data directly from the data bus inside the chip while ensuring the power supply of the chip?"

This is equivalent to wiring on a silicon wafer. Let's put aside whether the power supply problem can be solved. Anatoly glanced at him and said, "Impossible, at least not for us. Comrade Vitali, the pins on the silicon wafer are made of metal contacts through plating and other means in the early stage of manufacturing, and then the pins can be connected. As for the internal data bus you mentioned, first of all, we can't find it. We can't find this bus among thousands of transistors. Secondly, you can't connect the line even if you find it. In the most optimistic situation, we need to face a 10-micron wide aluminum-plated channel, and we don't even have this condition."

At this time, another Russian expert raised his head from the instrument and said, "Impossible! Even if you open the chip and connect the wires, you won't be able to read anything."

"Mr. Davari, what do you mean?" This was an expert in electronics. Although he was also not good at integrated circuits, he was better than Vitali and Anatoly, who were good at computers, in electronics.

The electronics expert pointed to an instrument nearby. The red LED numbers on the instrument looked very beautiful. The LED digital tube was also imported from comrades in the south.

"This is a milliammeter. It is testing the current and power consumption of the address decoding microcontroller you mentioned. Although the program and data inside have been lost, it will still consume power under normal circumstances. But please pay attention."

Confused and not knowing what was going on, Vitali and Anatoly looked at the milliammeter.

There is a number jumping on it, probably in the range of tens of milliamperes.

The electronics expert reached out and removed a piece of black opaque plastic from the top of the decoder microcontroller that had been polished off, which was equivalent to exposing the silicon wafer of the decoder microcontroller directly to the light.

Anatoly and the other man saw a very magical phenomenon at this time. Just after he removed the plastic sheet, the numbers on the milliammeter jumped rapidly in a very short period of time and became only a few tens of thousands.

"What does this mean?" Vitali asked, feeling uneasy.

"This means that once the silicon wafer is exposed to light, the power supply to the chip will be cut off. This has nothing to do with the external enameled wires. It is a function of the chip itself."

Vitali and Anatoly knew very well that with the special structure of this chip, if the power was cut off for even one second, all the data and programs in it would be destroyed.

"How did they do it?" Anatoly was disheartened.

"My guess, and it's just a guess, is that they made light-sensitive components directly on the silicon wafer in some key places in the integrated circuit and integrated them into the entire circuit. These light-sensitive components have only one function, which is to cut off the power supply to the chip after sensing light."

Making photosensitive components on silicon wafers is not a difficult task, especially with the advent of integrated circuit technology. It just needs to be considered during the design process.

"Then..." Vitali wanted to ask something else.

The electronics expert shook his head. "I know what you want to ask. It's impossible to get past it. They can place many of these components anywhere, and even many types, visible light, near infrared, far infrared... We have no way to find these photosensitive components one by one among thousands of transistors and other structures. This means that if any part of the chip is exposed to light, data may be lost."

Vitali did want to step over these photosensitive elements, but at this point they had realized that it was impossible.

There was more bad news. An expert came in hurriedly with a document.

"Comrades, I have bad news."

This comrade was borrowed temporarily. He is in charge of materials. Because the imitation team found some not-so-good situations when disassembling the relay, he was temporarily assigned to come here.

"Go ahead..." The Russians present had long been numb. Since it was all bad news, they might as well listen to it all at once to avoid being tortured repeatedly.

"The contacts of their relays are made of a very special material. To be clear, we don't have that material." The materials expert raised the information in his hand.

"Could it be a precious metal relay? There are such relays in the Citigroup's crossbar switch."

To put it bluntly, it is to utilize the excellent properties of precious metals, work hard to achieve miracles, and achieve performance that ordinary contact metals cannot achieve.

The stuff is good, the only problem is that it's expensive, really expensive.

"No, the material they use is not very expensive. It's mainly tungsten and silver."

"Since you know the ingredients, can't you just make it directly, my comrade?" Vitali said.

"It's not as simple as you think, my Davari. Knowing the ingredients and being able to make the same material are two completely different things. The distance between the two is as far as from the Far East to here."

The materials expert thought of the imported high-temperature alloys that had left his colleagues helpless until now.

"For example, my chemical composition is not much different from that of a pig." Thinking of this, the materials expert made a technical joke.

All the Russians present laughed and said to relax a little since it was already like this.

At least compared to other news, this problem is not even a problem. At worst, you can use precious metal relays, or even old-fashioned relays, although it will cost a lot.

What the Russians want is a program-controlled switch, not necessarily a "small program-controlled switch".

"Report to the higher-ups, my comrades. Comrade Nan Fang's switch is completely impossible to copy, at least at this stage. Instead of wasting everyone's energy on this matter, why don't we do something else? For example, test this machine to see how it works? At least we still have a good one."

"You have a point, but in that case, we have to buy at least one more." An old Russian communications expert shrugged.

"why?"

"Because we can't complete the test between the two exchanges with just this one intact one, even the most basic test can't be completed."

Looking at the machine that had been dismantled into pieces, everyone present smiled bitterly.

(End of this chapter)