Discontinued IC's

From: Chris Kennedy <chris_at_mainecoon.com>
Date: Mon Jul 31 19:28:39 2000

"Clint Wolff (VAX collector)" wrote:

> I have been wondering how difficult it would be to pop the top off
> an ASIC (perhaps one of the DEC gate arrays in my 11/750), photograph
> it using the probe station at work, and reverse engineer the circuitry
> based on the photographs. A program to recognize individual transistors
> wouldn't be too difficult, then generating simple gates (nand,nor,invert),
> from them, the high level stuff like registers and busses...

> Anybody know of a tool to do something like that?

Well, if you want Verilog or VHDL as output you could use LayBool,
but it's fragile and, as with most EDA tools, expensive
(~USD100K). At one time it was peddled by SGS-Thomson, then Compass,
now god-knows-who. It gets badly confused by precharge logic, but
you're not likely to see that in something from an 11/750 ;-)

-- 
Chris Kennedy
chris_at_mainecoon.com
http://www.mainecoon.com
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685  6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
Received on Mon Jul 31 2000 - 19:28:39 BST

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