SIM cards can survive fires, possibly even terrorist bombings

If you thought that little piece of plastic that lets your GSM phone get jiggy with your carrier’s network was fragile, think again. Apparently, you can cook your SIM card (GSM-only, for reasons that should be obvious) to incredible temperatures and still retrieve your stored contact info.

Two electronic engineers, Benjamin Jones and Tony Kenyon, from University College London decided to find out just how much abuse a standard SIM card can take. They collected 12 SIM cards and subjected them to intense heat. The plastic epoxy that surrounds the SIM circuitry was stripped away using acid, and the bare circuits were exposed to heat for 10 minutes – the SIM cards were then probed for data recovery.

Six of the SIM cards were heated to 356 F (180 C) and escaped with absolutely no data loss. The researchers were able to retrieve the SIM cards’ data with no rewiring.

Five SIM cards were heated to a searing 842 F (450 C), but only one of these cards was readable. Four of the SIM cards could not be read by the researcher’s circuitry probing, while the fifth SIM card served up data briefly, before heading for SIM-card heaven.

The final, 12th SIM card was heated to 1,202 F (650 C), leaving the circuitry unreadable.

The researchers note that SIM cards can definitely survive heating up to 842 F, with the stored data recoverable through fairly straight forward means. It’s also likely that SIM cards can keep data intact at temperature beyond 842 F, but will require more advanced data-retrieval techniques used by forensic investigators.

Sweet, so the next time your mobile phones battery explodes, rest assured that your SIM card and all that precious contact information will be intact. That is, as long as you have the means to recover said data.

[Via: AFP]