Design, Simulation, and Experimental Verification of a Destruction Mechanism of Transient Electronic Devices

To quickly destroy electronic devices and ensure information security, a destruction mechanism of transient electronic devices was designed in this paper. By placing the Ni-Cr film resistance and the energetic material between the chip and the package and heating the resistance by an electric current, the energetic material expanded and the chip cracked. The information on the chip was destroyed. The author simulated the temperature distribution and stress of the power-on structure in different sizes by ANSYS software. The simulation results indicate that the chip cracks within 50 ms under the trigger current of 0.5 A when a circular groove with an area of 1 mm2 and depth of 0.1 mm is filled with an expansion material with an expansion coefficient of 10−5°C−1. Then, the author prepared a sample for experimental verification. Experimental results show that the sample chip quickly cracks and fails within 10 ms under the trigger current of 1 A. The simulation and experimental results confirm the feasibility of the structure in quick destruction, which lays the foundation for developing instantaneous-failure integrated circuit products to meet information security applications.

1. Introduction
With the rapid development of semiconductor technology, electronic technology has brought unparalleled convenience to people’s life by accelerating and improving the acquisition, storage, and transmission of information. As physical carriers of information and technology, electronic components are related to the security of core information and key technologies of military equipment and are the hard power to guarantee the security of the “fifth territory”—cyberspace, after land, sea, air, and sky [1]. Traditionally, the core electronic components are destroyed by high-pressure burning, quick wiping [2], or encryption algorithm [3] method to ensure information security. However, for the high-pressure burning method, there is a hidden danger of incomplete damage to core components; for the quick erasing method, the information may be recovered because of incomplete erasing; for the encryption algorithm method, as the algorithm and other core technical information are stored in the physical carrier of equipment, security problems may occur at the device level [4].

Professor John A. Rogers [5] of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign published an article in Science in 2012, proposing the concept of transient electronics, which has brought a new “dawn” to the chip security technology needed by information security. However, there are some unavoidable and difficult technical obstacles for the transient electronic technology based on degradation and disappearance in practical application, including the following aspects: first, the introduction of biodegradable materials makes the packaging and structure of devices different from that of conventional electronic devices fundamentally, which is difficult to meet the requirements of conventional electronic devices, especially for military electronic devices that are resistant to high temperature, cold, acid, and alkali, and even radiation and other harsh application environments; second, a transient electronic device should be equipped with ultrathin core part and even must adopt such device types as thin-film electronic and organic electronic, which restricts the applicable scene of transient electronic devices seriously and makes them difficult to meet the application requirements such as high power and large driving ability; last, it is difficult to reconcile the contradiction between the long-time stability and fast degradation of transient electronic devices, which greatly limits the reliability of transient electronic devices.