I feel like an idiot asking this, especially since ive been an open source user and supporter since the late 90s, but I have never understood free as in beer? That means the tool is free but closed source?
Why would it depend on how the chip is wired? Its pin pitch is relatively big, big enough to solder jumpers on and lift others off the pads. I dont know much about these chips it sounds like you do, is there a bigger issue rewriting it?
I still have a major problem If I were to rewrite the chip or even replace it with a more friendly one, let me show a picture of the board
I am pretty sure those two chips in the back are digital RF attenuators wired in parallel. I can use the front panel controls to set the ADF chips frequency and set an attenuation level from -50db to 10db so a set of attenuators makes sense. I know the ADF chip has some internal way to set the power output(but I dont think it has 60db of dynamic range, it could....) so if thats how attenuation is controled then I have NO idea what those chips are!
So the problem is if I dump the existing firmware and start from scratch I better know what those mystery chips are and how to set there registers! The best way to figure that out is to be able to dump the firmware... even if I could do that I have no idea how to decipher all that hex to figure out what the hell those two chips do.
If your not going to supply fn software with your product at least leave chip labels in tact so other people can!