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- Hacker News
- In a simplified scenario (not too far from this)? Yeah, we've done that in CTFs almost a decade ago.by q3k
- 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.
by kayson - (A crash course in how chips get made)
That paragraph + illustration is one of the simplest, concise, easy-to-grasp descriptions of IC design process I've come across. Nice!
Now the reverse: what I'd really love is a free (libre) automated toolset to go from IC die shot(s) -> transistors+interconnects -> gate-level schematic (logic gates & flipflops). Person interested in RE a chip's function can take it from there.
To me, the whole "here's a section of the die photo" to "that's an n-bit adder" etc step is like black magic. Not to mention extremely tedious.
Get that to a higher-level view easy, and it would be much more doable to work out function of each element.
by RetroTechie - Solved it. Took me ~6 human hours, over a total of 24 hours. But it was NOT easy!
I've been making chips for amost 30 years, and I run the https://github.com/smprather/engineering-loadout project, so I had all the tools sitting at my fingertips (KLayout, Surfer, Icarus Verilog, etc).
by smprather - 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.by Dwedit
- 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.by zie1ony
- 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
by zoenolan - I reverse engineered the Game Boy from pictures of the die - https://github.com/aappleby/metroboy - so yes, it's totally doable. It is also incredibly tedious and frustrating.
Not sure if that gives me an advantage in this challenge, but I have too many things to do already. :D
by aappleby