This summer, our summer intern Greg d’Eon made a quick project to build a X-Y Scanner from a 3D printer (by ‘quick’, I mean it took him less than 2 days!). You can see the source code up on GitHub. Anyway, 3D printers are very nice as they have fairly high resolution and fairly low cost. Here’s a quick video:
We’re using it to measure EM emissions frequencies over a PCB, but you could also use this for side-channel emissions, or fault injection. While the resolution might not be high enough for getting at specific features on a chip surface, it can still be used for general positioning.
With your EM emissions, you can graph X-Y vs. amplitude – here I’ve constrained the range to get an idea where the 96 MHz emissions are concentrated. Probably more interesting would have been to use a 2D plot with colour overlaid over the PCB design:
You can also do things like plot frequency vs. position with strength of the signal given by color. In the following graph the X position is fixed, and only the Y position is varied. You can see here the 96MHz oscillator of the SAM3U microcontroller on the ChipWhisperer-Lite for example:
