Reading Silicon: How to Reverse Engineer Integrated Circuits
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a clear account of the craft of reading chips from photographs.
What it is
Ken Shirriff walks through how to reverse engineer integrated circuits from die photos, using famous chips as examples, in a Hackaday SuperConference talk.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2018 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Recommends espeed · 2019-07 · on “Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]”
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
Recommends gnunez · 2021-01 · on “Siliconpr0n: High Resolution Chip Maps”
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] .
Cites aavaas · 2018-04 · on “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? (2017)”
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.