28 Jan
2006
28 Jan
'06
4:17 a.m.
Chris M wrote:
what about asics, fplds, fpgar, vlsis (the latter
being of most interest to me), etc. etc. etc. Can
those be readily reverse engineered. Say you had a
*bad* vlsi, and a block diagram of its innards. Could
the *details* be worked out, and would it be feasible
to reproduce it as an fpga?
It is possible.
If you have access to the right equipment, unlimited time and busloads
of money.
If you meant to say : I want to repair this machine which has a broken
unobtainable vlsi chip, then forget it . A oneoff copy of a vlsi chip in
a FPGA is just plain too much work.
The easiest solution is to recreate the design from scratch, using VHDL
or Verilog. Understanding the machine that the chip was operating in is
much more important than shaving bits of a defective chip trying to
obtain a schematic.
Jos Dreesen