Can we make something like chip reader, which can understand chip design and generate blueprint of it?
Electronic – Is it possible to reverse engineer a chip design
integrated-circuitreverse-engineering
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Look at it this way: No matter which path you choose, you are reverse-engineering the old design. Before you can build a new chip, select a new off-the-shelf chip, or design a new PCA, you will first have to determine what are all the behaviors, features, and characteristics of the old design that need to be reproduced in the new design.
You'll need to prepare a detailed specification of what the new design must do to reproduce the behavior of the old design. Detailed down to the "bug-compatibility" layer. If a user pushes two unrelated buttons at once, do you need to reproduce the old behavior (maybe the old design crashes when this happens)? If the batteries are put in backwards, do you need to reproduce the old behavior? If the voice recording includes normally non-audible frequencies, do you need to reproduce the old behavior?
Once you have a thorough and detailed spec for what you want to build, then you'll be in a much better place to decide what's the best path to build it.
If you do decide to re-use some of the old design I can only offer a couple of ideas:
If you want to reproduce a chip, be prepared for sticker shock. My understanding is that for the absolute lowest-cost type of custom chip (structured ASIC) NRE charges start at US$100k. If you aren't saving something in the range of 6 engineer-months (or gaining some behavior that's absolutely not reproducible any other way) by going this route, its probably not viable.
Given the high NRE for a custom chip, at your volumes an FPGA or CPLD solution could be cost-competitive (at much lower risk) with a new chip design. But a new microcontroller design will likely have much lower materials cost than either one.
If you want to find a form-fit replacement for the old chip to mount on the existing PCB, consider the idea of a daughter card with pins or pads that mount on the old footprint. On this daughter card you could include more than one part, a new part in a different package, or a new part with its pins re-routed to match the old footprint.
Of course it's possible. There are many companies that provide these services. The real question is whether or not you could do this at home.
You might get away without needing a SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope), that design might be done in ~3u geometry which would imagable using visible light.
You'll need a wet bench to etch off layers, like HF for SiO2 but you will also have to remove Si3N4, SiON and Aluminum. It's possible you may need a dry etch (Ar plasma in a vacuum chamber) to remove tungsten plugs in vias.
Your main issues will be measuring the exact values of resistors and capacitors (if there are any). Delineating the boundaries of substrate implants (decoration with more nasty chemicals in a wet bench) and determination of doping profiles. The doping profiles are easily obtained in a SIMS unit (Secondary Ion Mass spectrometer) but some of the structural details of implants in the FEOL (Front End of Line) can be subtle.
There will be subtle layer thicknesses that will need to measured before they are damaged or reduced in thickness by the wet etches.
There will be significant topography of the surface of the die (CMP didn't exist then) so depth of focus might complicate picture taking.
It would be unlikely that you'd be able to get the exact transistor characteristics that the original chip had easily. You'd really need to understand not just processing but transistor physics and the role of different implants.
On the positive side, if you had multiple chips (which you would need) you might be able to liberate access to a transistor and be able to put it on a curve tracer to measure directly. The feature size is large enough and being an analog chip it would probably have some large transistors in it. But there is no certainty in that.
The other good news is that you can buy old SEM's for low cost. Only a few $10K and even though they are grainy this chip has large features. Mind you if you have a SIMS unit that also can image (it is a modified SEM) so you might get away without duplicating eqt.
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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 from flylogic website