31 Jul
2000
31 Jul
'00
11:40 a.m.
I have been wondering how difficult it would be to pop
the top off
an ASIC (perhaps one of the DEC gate arrays in my 11/750), photograph
it using the probe station at work, and reverse engineer the circuitry
based on the photographs. A program to recognize individual transistors
wouldn't be too difficult, then generating simple gates (nand,nor,invert),
from them, the high level stuff like registers and busses...
Anybody know of a tool to do something like that?
There are companies that specialize in reverse-engineering chips. It's
reported that they've automated the process from photomicrograph to
netlist. However, they consider their tools to be highly proprietary.
AFAIK, they're not for sale at any price.
Chips with more than two layers of metal are substantially harder
to reverse-engineer. A simple photomicrograph isn't sufficient.