Can You Reverse Engineer an ASIC?
Jane Street has released a new puzzle that challenges you to reverse engineer an ASIC from its GDS layout. The chip's design is unlabeled, so you must recover the netlist, figure out its purpose, and find the output string that triggers the success signal. A warm-up example and open-source tools are provided to get you started.
The GDS is, in a very real sense, the chip. Everything the circuit does is in there. The tricky part: nothing is labeled!
- zoenolan
I thought the article was going to be about how people scan chips
Rapid Chip Reverse Engineering Using Laser, Focused ion beams, and Scanning electron microscope
https://academic.oup.com/mam/article/30/Supplement_1/ozae044...
FIBs are also used to test modifications before doing a respin. I'm still in awe that matter can be manipulated so precisely
- BobbyTables2
Hasn’t Ken Shirriff been doing this for quite a while? (:->
- Dwedit
I've looked at Visual 6502 and it's way beyond me. I've even looked at the scans where it shows how they severed the connection to disable 6502 decimal mode on the NES.
- kayson
Getting a logic-gate-level netlist from a GDS is trivial with industry standard chip design tools. Circuit designers do this every day. The hardest part will be reverse engineering the functionality.
I wish I had more time and I'd throw Calibre at it.
- zie1ony
At my uni, 15 years ago, one postdoc reverse engineered NVIDIA chip and wrote more performant compiler. He did that by connecting oscyloscops to all chip's outputs and started with applying random current on inputs. Using ML and his genius he rediscoverd all opcodes including a few hidden ones. Eventually he got hired by some company that was doing a lot of GPU on supercomputers.