Re: Are chips more vulnerable to witchcraft than transisters?

On Fri, 6/19/2026 11:49 PM, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote:
> On 6/20/2026 4:00 AM, Paul wrote:
>>
>> They're generally scale-invariant.
>>
>> The scribbling on them is smaller, but then we put more of the
>> scribbling, so they end up having the same X-Y dimensions for the price.
> 
> 
> 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. :)

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.

  https://hackaday.com/2014/04/05/taking-pictures-with-a-dram-chip/

Articles on this sort of thing, might have started around 1980.
The images do not look good, and you would not expect them
to look good.

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