Reverse Engineering in the Semiconductor Industry

The intent of this paper is to give an overview of the place of reverse engineering (RE) in the semiconductor industry, and the techniques used to obtain information from semiconductor products. The continuous drive of Moore's law to increase the integration level of silicon chips has presented major challenges to the reverse engineer, obsolescing simple teardowns and demanding the adopted of new and more sophisticated technology to analyse chips. This trend is continuing; the 2006 update of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors is predicting the shrinkage of transistor gates from the current 65-nm generation to 16 nm at the turn of the decade, and the usage of over 1.5 billion transistors in high-volume microprocessor chips. The paper covers product teardowns, and discusses the techniques used for system-level analysis, both hardware and software; circuit extraction, taking the chip down to the transistor level and working back up through the interconnects to create schematics; and process analysis, looking at how a chip is made, and what it is made of. Examples are also given of each type of RE.