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Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?

https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-reverse-engineer-an-asic/
69bschne | | 46 | HN
zoenolan | parent | next
I thought the article was going to be about how people scan chips

Rapid Chip Reverse Engineering Using Laser, Focused ion beams, and Scanning electron microscope https://academic.oup.com/mam/article/30/Supplement_1/ozae044...

FIBs are also used to test modifications before doing a respin. I'm still in awe that matter can be manipulated so precisely

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kayson | parent | next
Getting a logic-gate-level netlist from a GDS is trivial with industry standard chip design tools. Circuit designers do this every day. The hardest part will be reverse engineering the functionality.

I wish I had more time and I'd throw Calibre at it.

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zie1ony | parent | next
At my uni, 15 years ago, one postdoc reverse engineered NVIDIA chip and wrote more performant compiler. He did that by connecting oscyloscops to all chip's outputs and started with applying random current on inputs. Using ML and his genius he rediscoverd all opcodes including a few hidden ones. Eventually he got hired by some company that was doing a lot of GPU on supercomputers.
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inigyou | parent | next
You can't do that by applying random inputs to any single-chip GPU - it has far too much state. I can see that perhaps it worked on some of the early multi-chip cards - where one chip was a texture sampler, and so on.

You'll have more luck reverse engineering the software driver first. They're not hidden, you can just open the driver files in Ghidra, the almost-universal tool for open-sourcing proprietary code. Hidden opcodes can be discovered first by just trying all the opcodes you couldn't discover any other way. You only need to go to the physical level if they're really hidden.

sigbottle | root | parent
To be fair, Ghidra was released in 2019 and in general knowledge was still hard to find even back in 2010 I feel (well, compared to 2026 in the age of AI)
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tverbeure | parent | next
There is absolutely no way that happened. 15 years ago, we're talking Fermi class GPUs and chips with hundreds of millions of bits of on-chip state and much more if you include the DRAM.

You can't tease out the right information by applying random inputs. Which input would you even use? The PCIe interface? You'd first "randomly" need to get past its complex training sequences...

Your postdoc probably wrote micro-benchmarks of some sort. That is a common technique.

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pixelatedindex | parent
“oscyloscops” is a way better spelling I gotta say.
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whitten | parent | next
Is there something like an Extract-SPICE tool that takes a circuit and gives you back a text rendering of it ?
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Joel_Mckay | parent
Practically No, the stack-up of metal layers often hides the gate structures underneath, and the billions of process cells may not all be the same.

Theoretically Yes, as an ion-beam-mill and electron-microscope combination machine can slice up semiconductors layer-by-layer. Given these machines can often also give precise x-ray analysis material data, the exact makeup of the chip can be extracted by competitors given enough time. =3

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NooneAtAll3 | parent | next
looks like they didn't post any blog post about 2nd NN challenge (https://huggingface.co/spaces/jane-street/droppedaneuralnet)

I was waiting for some writeup about permutation decyphering

mentat | parent | next
30 minutes with /goal for the solution from Sol w/ high.
q3k | parent | next
In a simplified scenario (not too far from this)? Yeah, we've done that in CTFs almost a decade ago.

https://blog.dragonsector.pl/2017/10/?m=1

inigyou | parent
From where do I know the name Dragon Sector and q3k? You aren't the ones who hacked the train DRM, are you? Or maybe active in the demo scene? Or maybe I'm just confusing you with TRSi?
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IshKebab | parent | next
That sounds like a fun challenge. Feels a lot more tractable than the neural net one.
ck2 | parent | next
people who can do this stuff are super-smartypants

but reminds me how we're going to find out on an industrial level when the Saudis give China some nvidia chips they were grifted

they've cloned lots of chips before but nothing that advanced

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inigyou | parent | next
You can do this. If you commit the whole next month to it you'll make quite some progress. But you won't.
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inigyou | parent
China has no shortage of Nvidia chips. It costs nothing (relatively) for someone to just buy a 5090 off the shelf and send it there.
inigyou | parent
Is this the chip they used to steal money from the Indian stock market until they got banned from India?
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