2020/04/28 by Ronald S. Wilson, Navid Asadizanjani, Wilson, Ronald +5
Engineering · Materials Science · #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Electron and X-Ray Spectroscopy Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Industrial Vision Systems and Defect Detection #Integrated Circuits and Semiconductor Failure Analysis #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2004.13874
openalex publication_date 2020/04/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In the Reverse Engineering and Hardware Assurance domain, a majority of the data acquisition is done through electron microscopy techniques such as Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). However, unlike its counterparts in optical imaging, only a limited number of techniques are available to enhance and extract information from the raw SEM images. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm to segment out Integrated Circuit (IC) structures from the SEM image. Unlike existing algorithms discussed in this paper, this algorithm is unsupervised, parameter-free and does not require prior information on the noise model or features in the target image making it effective in low quality image acquisition scenarios as well. Furthermore, the results from the application of the algorithm on various structures and layers in the IC are reported and discussed.