Overview

Are you looking to gather evidence to prove that one of your competitors has been infringing upon your intellectual property? Interested in recreating obsolete, hard-to-find parts? Perhaps you’re performing some technical competitive analysis, and want to get some insight into a competing product. The teardown services offered at IAL are a perfect fit for these applications, among many others.

Fundamentals

IAL’s custom-tailored teardown services are as unique and varied as the customers who request them. Integrated circuit teardowns make heavy use of the deprocessing, cross-sectioning, and electron microscopy expertise acquired over years of experience and experimentation. Whether you’re looking for a simple cross-section and SEM inspection to determine some process parameters or a complete, layer-by-layer deprocessed sample set with high resolution optical and electron microscope images that can be used to completely reverse engineer a PCB or other electronic device, IAL can provide the data you need. For the most in-depth circuit extraction tasks, IAL can provide SEM mosaic images of large functional blocks at extremely high magnifications, which can be stacked into a multi-layer image with extremely precise alignment allowing a signal to be traced over multiple layers of the device.

Of course, integrated circuits are not the only teardown targets that we can handle; MEMS devices, circuit boards, and many other types of devices are all within our scope of capabilities. Our team of engineers can review your requirements and assemble custom tests to provide exactly the data that you need in the most efficient way possible. Working from patent documents, lawyer-specified protocols, or hand-in-hand with an SME or circuit extractor, we can provide the critical data needed for your application.

Sample Types

While the majority of our experience is with integrated circuits (ICs) and printed circuit boards (PCBs), IAL has performed successful teardowns on a wide range of products, from complicated MEMS gyroscopes and microphones to LEDs, cameras, touchscreens, and many others. No matter what your requirements might be, IAL is willing to provide a custom-tailored solution.

Applications

• Circuit extraction and reverse engineering of obsolete parts
• Identifying semiconductor patent and IP infringement for litigation support
• Building a “known parts” database for counterfeit screening
• Gathering competitive intelligence in preparation for new product launches