How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses

Re:How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparabl... by camgunz on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @01:18AM (#23536140)

Are these fuses extremely small? I would assume they’re easy to bypass otherwise.

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Re:How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparabl... by mlyle on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @02:09AM (#23536376)

They are produced by lithography and are on the actual die of the system-on-chip that contains the processor. I believe they're IBM's eFUSE technology on Tegra, but antifuses have been used for similar purposes:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/IBM-System-z9-eFUSE-ap...

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Re:How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparabl... by wutbrodo on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @01:30AM (#23536197)

From the beginning of the article:

> It’s theoretically possible to physically modify the SoC and replace the fuses, but it’s so prohibitively invasive and expensive that it’s not a real option.

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Re:How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparabl... by camgunz on Tuesday June 16, 2020 @01:40PM (#23541834)

Yeah I read that but, I wanted to know why.

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