Micro read

The micro read process involves manually viewing and interpreting data seen on the memory chip. The examiner uses an electron microscope and analyzes the physical gates on the chip and then translates the gate status to 0s and 1s to determine the resulting ASCII characters. The whole process is time-consuming and costly, and it requires extensive knowledge and training on memory and the filesystem. Due to the extreme technicalities involved in micro read, it is only attempted for high-profile cases equivalent to a national security crisis after all other levels of extraction techniques have been exhausted. The process is rarely performed and is not well documented at this time. Also, there are currently no commercial tools available to perform a micro read.