HACKADAY
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2018–2021
31:52 · 416K views · Dec 27, 2016
Ken Shirriff walks through how to reverse engineer integrated circuits from die photos, using famous chips as examples, in a Hackaday SuperConference talk.
Recommended as a clear account of the craft of reading chips from photographs.
3 comments from Hacker News
Have you ever seen one of Professor Sussman's talks where he analyzes a circuit diagram? For example, see Prof Sussman's 2011 StrangeLoop talk (circuit analysis example begins at ~25 min mark)... We Really Don't Know How To Compute! [LINK] If you have the hardware schematic or the physical hardware and enough time, you can figure out what the hardware does. You can determine what its constraints are, and if you understand it well enough (for simplicity's sake, let's say you understand the hardware up to the level of the engineers who designed it), you can tell what the hardware system can and can't do and what type of codes are required to make the hardware work. You can tell at a low level what the GarageBand developers had to work with when they designed their game. And once you know the required codes, you can write software to generate the codes to make it work. And if you're really good and have the right tools, you can analyze the hardware and/or model the data flows to determine what the optimal data structures must be based on the hardware capacity constraints and data flow. Google "reverse engineering hardware chip circuits" or watch Ken Shirriff's 2016 Hackaday talk... Reading Silicon: How to Reverse Engineer Integrated Circuits this video
Some hobbyists use these die shots to reverse engineer older chips, bypassing the need to decap the chips themselves. The craft is explained nicely in this video this video .
People do reverse engineer chips by photographing them. this video (Reading Silicon: How to Reverse Engineer Integrated Circuits). But as far as I know, the same cannot be done with the brains even if we can photograph it. I guess the 3D structure of the brain compounded with high interconnection between neurons does not make it easy.