It seems with any spy movie of the past couple decades and with computers in some form becoming more and more ingrained in our everyday lives we see some sort of electronics needing to be smashed in order to keep it for the bad guys or vice versa and out of the hands of the good guys. Now it is always funny to me the ways that movies and television come up with how to destroy a piece of hardware and now DARPA and IBM are working to make it happen without having to someone shoot or smash a PC.
DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) awarded IBM a $3.45M contract to develop CMOS chips that will have the capability to explode and self destruct on command. The project “Vanishing Programmable Resources” is the name and the reason is to keep expensive or classified next gen military technology out of the hands of the enemy. Here is what DARPA had to say about it,
“It is nearly impossible to track and recover every [electronic] device [on the battlefield], resulting in unintended accumulation in the environment and potential unauthorized use and compromise of intellectual property and technological advantage.”
“electronic systems capable of physically disappearing in a controlled, triggerable manner…[with] performance comparable to commercial-off-the-shelf electronics, but with limited device persistence that can be programmed, adjusted in real-time, triggered, and/or be sensitive to the deployment environment”.
So now the question is when does this get filtered down into the consumer market? Typically this is not something ModCrash would cover but thought it was prettying interesting.
How do they self destruct a CMOS chip?
The method they use to actually self destruct the CMOS chip is using a glass substrate that will shatter when attached to “fuse or reactive metal layer” that then can be activated by a external radio frequency.
I read about this on a couple of different sites and pretty much everyone of them asked the same questions about if devices were put in a faraday cage, ect which are valid but i’m sure even DARPA is working on that too. Humans 1 – Skynet 0!
DARPA & IBM Self Destructing CMOS Chips