Electronic – Is it possible to reverse engineer a chip design

integrated-circuitreverse-engineering

Can we make something like chip reader, which can understand chip design and generate blueprint of it?

Best Answer

ChipWorks has an excellent blog about doing exactly this, with lots of great pictures here.

FlyLogic also has an excellent blog. It is here.

The short answer is it is absolutely possible. IC DIEs are basically really small circuit boards. You can reverse engineer them pretty easily, it just takes a different tool set.

I want to particularly call attention to some posts flylogic did on reverse-engineering ICs (how topical!) here and here.

Image borrowed from flylogic
Image from flylogic website