Tell me more ×
Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for electronics and electrical engineering professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 0 down vote favorite

Here is a post about extracting electronics out of a smart card. Here're two photos from there (arrows on the second photo are irrelevant to this question):

http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/post_ezlink1.jpg, CC-SA license http://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/post_ezlink5.jpg, CC-SA license

Note that on both photos the chip is covered with some randomly located shiny fibers that look like thin metal pieces.

What are those shiny fibers for?

share|improve this question
1  
In the photograph they look more like scratches or cracks in some encasing plastic, which could have gotten damaged when the part was excavated from the card. – Olin Lathrop Oct 3 '12 at 11:54
@Olin Lathrop: Well, if you look at the second photo, left upper corner, where the shiny thing crosses the black stripe - that looks like the black thing completely overlaps the shiny thing, having such scratch or crack is highly unlikely. – sharptooth Oct 3 '12 at 12:46
Some form of tamper-detection? – pjc50 Oct 3 '12 at 14:27
Could those scratches be for tuning the antenna on the chip? I've seen something like it on SparkFun, when they took apart a "SPOT" transmitter. The scratches were for tuning purposes: dlnmh9ip6v2uc.cloudfront.net/tutorialimages/SPOT/… – SimpleCoder Oct 3 '12 at 14:41

Know someone who can answer? Share a link to this question via email, Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.