Yeah, it might be retarded compared to using your brain and guessing (or in my case, getting a minute of free time to trojan the damn board), but don't you really wanna know what's in those chip? I know I'm morbidly curious, we're all sure it's a gate array from that toshiba datasheet but ... are we absolutely sure? What if there's something surprising waiting for us?
It's not hard if you delayer the chip btw: Stain, etch, stain, etch then extract rectangles (e.g. hough transform) after the micrograph, reverse engineer the standard cells and use some already written software (e.g. Mentor Graphics Calibre) to extract the RTL after converting the rectangles to GDSII. Not easy and you would need an SEM image of the surface to figure out the depth as well as good guesstimation to figure out what each layer is and how much to dilute the enchant for it. I don't know if Dr. Decap does this but even if he did, it'd be a job in the thousands of dollars range.
Anyway, I personally am not demanding anything just humbly stating my own preference. Dr. Decap can do whatever the heck he wants with the money I sent him, any chips in the pipeline is worth looking at.
Edited by austere (08/07/11 07:28 PM)
|