What prerequisites I need to solve this puzzle? I don't have much knowledge in electrical engineering.
Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
41–50 of 89 posts
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#42people 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
I'm a chip designer, back in the early 90s I visited a small silicon house who were doing some work for us, their boardroom table had been taken over by a giant sized photomicrograph of IBM's VGA chip and they had a bunch of summer hire grad students tracing wiring and matching standard cells (easier back then because we only worked in 2 layers of metal). They weren't trying to steal IBM's design, they already had on…
MODE-X launched 1,000 ships too with the demoscene.
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#43I've looked at Visual 6502 and it's way beyond me. I've even looked at the scans where it shows how they severed the connection to disable 6502 decimal mode on the NES.
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#44I've looked at Visual 6502 and it's way beyond me. I've even looked at the scans where it shows how they severed the connection to disable 6502 decimal mode on the NES.
To be fair, the 6502 is very dense, and very hand optimized.
Modern systems tend to use "standard cells" for logic which is a lot more digestible.
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#45At 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.
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. Hidde…
Small pedantic nit: Open-sourcing is not the same as reverse-engineering.
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#46people 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
They did give the chips to China, but they didn’t work. Turns out they’d first taken them to the basement where someone cut them into pieces before sending them to China.
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d recommend the Chenming-Hu books on solar cells and semis available as pdfs on his site. https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/modern-semiconductor-devices-fo... LLMs have already been shown to cause cognitive/skill performance losses in some users. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axOcn--n_lM
> LLMs have already been shown to cause cognitive/skill performance losses in some users. =3 Sorry to interrupt your smugness, but have you actually read that study? It's basically tautological: people remained mostly unfamiliar with code they did not write, and remained mostly unfamiliar with a library they did not use. That's kind of the whole point to begin with! https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.h…
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Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. There is exactly that, and we call it an "extraction" tool. It takes a GDS (text representation of shapes in the physical layout), and gives you back a "netlist" (text representation of components and connections in a circuit schematic). Circuit designers use these tools basically daily for two reasons - the first is Layout Versus Schematic. We want to make sure that the physical layout matches the schematic, so…
yes, but at the transistor level .... it has no idea at that level how those transistors are arranged into gates directly
The tools can definitely recognize static logic gates purely from the topology (nothing special in the GDS needed). I don't know that I've tested it for anything more complicated, but as you've pointed out, if the hierarchy is in the GDS it's trivial to recover
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#49Getting 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.
Indeed, this is a problem for an energetic student who has free access to every tool in the Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor portfolios: take the GDS-II layout, run it through extraction, generate a netlist, convert to higher-level blocks ("netlist-to-gate recovery"), translate to RTL HDL, then attempt to work out "what it does."
This is just a job posting in disguise for Jane Street: solve the puzzle, get a call from one of their recruiters.
Re: Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d recommend the Chenming-Hu books on solar cells and semis available as pdfs on his site. https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/modern-semiconductor-devices-fo... LLMs have already been shown to cause cognitive/skill performance losses in some users. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axOcn--n_lM
You're replying to a probably now shadowbanned LLM bot that advertises Fable all day
Are these "shadow bans" in the room with you right now? What a nut.
Fable needs no advertising. It was more important than the printing press. Code singularity.
But it's old news, Fable is no longer my favorite LLM. I mostly use Kimi k3 now. It's also more competent than you are in general.
The primary point you're avoiding is that programming is not a job for professional humans anymore. At least not humans with any dignity or self respect or economic value.
I'm sure you at least agree with this point, like every other reasonable person does now too.