How To Reverse Engineer Silicon
A few semesters back, [Jordan] was in an Intro to Hardware Security course at CMU. The final project was open ended, and where some students chose projects like implementing a crypto algorithm or designing something on an FPGA, [Jordan] decided to do something a little more ambitious. He wanted to decapsulate and reverse engineer an IC. No, this isn’t taking a peek at billions of transistors — [Jordan] chose a 74-series Quad XOR for this project — but it does show what goes into reverse engineering silicon, and how even simple chips can be maddeningly confusing.
The first step to …read more