I'm bit clueless about purpose for reverse engineering of chip?

[dds737]

Hello,

There is nice project like http://www.degate.org/ - but what is significance of this for average Joe Reverse Engineer? You can copy functionality of chip maybe in VHDL, but  you can't build another VLSI without bunch of money? Or maybe I misunderstood the whole thing

Thanks

 

[rstofer]

Sometimes chips don't work.  Other times, they worked for a while then failed.  Sometimes people want to rip off the contents of flash memory.  Maybe your competitor has better specs, how come?

The really big application is failure analysis.

Somewhere around here there was a link to a walk-through of a failure analysis lab at one of the big semiconductor houses.  These folks have serious money tied up in the question of why chips fail.  Multiples of millions of dollars.

[ataradov]

Your typical MCUs include a lot of undocumented features, some of which are real nice to have, some are just for testing. Knowing them may be helpful in some cases.

And also, just for fun.

[Pack34]

That is so cool. I loved working with this stuff in grad school.

Thanks for sharing!