6 Jan
2010
6 Jan
'10
6:06 p.m.
On Wed, 6 Jan 2010, geoffrey oltmans wrote:
That's really remarkable. I imagine that the masks
are probably
worthless for today's processes though. :(
s/probably/definitely/
It would be a fantastic aid in reverse engineering
though.
That's the real value. A decent LVS tool can derive a netlist from the
layout file. From there, it's grunt-work organizing devices into
functional gates and getting a usable schematic. Given the relatively
small size of ancient layouts, I bet that there are free tools capable of
this analysis.
For comparison, current processors can have upwards of a billion
transistors. Extracting the netlist for checking mask data against the
as-designed schematic is quite non-trivial. Doing it in a reasonably
short amount of time - even more so.
Disclaimer: I'm heavily involved with LVS and netlist extraction in my day
job.
Steve
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