TL;DR: Less than you think, likely < 1000 USD.
The cost for renting such a machine (FIB) is 100-350 USD/h (depending on which university lab you choose). Some universities also offer to have one of their staff do the work for you (e.g., 165 USD/h at the University of Washington).
The duration for a single modification is less than 1 hour.
Additionally, there is some non-FIB preparation time, which seems to be ~1 day if you do it for one chip; see here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13276).
I am currently mentoring a SPAR project that calculates more accurate numbers and maps them to specific attack scenarios. We plan to release our results in 2-3 months.
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That's correct.
That said, chip modifications are done on the same FIB machine. The cost estimate still seems accurate to me.
H100s are manufactured on TSMC's "3nm" node (a brand name), which has a Gate Pitch of 48 nm and a Metal Pitch of 24 nm. The minimum feature size is 9-12nm, according to Claude.
You are not at the physical limitations:
- Gallium-based FIB circuit edits can go down to ~7nm.
- Helium-based FIB circuit edits (~3...5x more expensive
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