Learning Android Forensics - Second Edition

Chip-off

Chip-off involves heating the device's circuit board until the solder holding the components to the board melts, and then removing the flash memory chip. The memory chip can then be read using commercial tools, resulting in a full physical image. Chip-off techniques, like JTAG, stem from the commercial electronic production process. The process of melting the solder (commonly called reflow or rework) is used to place and remove components from a circuit board, and the readers used to acquire the memory are used to both read and write to memory chips, often in bulk quantities:

A memory chip being removed from a damaged phone (courtesy ...