ArticlePDF Available

A Framework for Reverse Engineering VLSI Chips.

Authors:
Khaled Elleithy at University of Bridgeport
Khaled Elleithy
Tarek Sobh at Lawrence Technological University
Tarek Sobh
Download full-text PDFDownload full-text PDFDownload full-text PDF
Read full-text
Download citation

Abstract

The reverse engineering process for VLSI chips is a complex operation that can cost from $10,000 for the simplest chips to hundreds of thousands of dollars for complex chips. In this paper, we present an overview of the process of reverse engineering VLSI chips. The paper outlines the steps involved in the process of reverse engineering chips as well as the different techniques used to extract the functionality of these chips. Furthermore, the paper presents two case studies for reverse engineering VLSI chips.
63.pdf
Content uploaded by Khaled Elleithy
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Khaled Elleithy
Content may be subject to copyright.
A Framework for Reverse Engineering VLSI Chi
ps.pdf
Content uploaded by Tarek Sobh
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Tarek Sobh
Content may be subject to copyright.
A Framework for Reverse Engineering VLSI Chi
ps.pdf
Content uploaded by Tarek Sobh
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Tarek Sobh
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Basic concepts for an HDL reverse engineering tool-set
Conference Paper
Full-text available
  • Dec 1996
Designer's productivity has become the key-factor of the development of electronic systems. An increasing application of design data reuse is widely recognized as a promising technique to master future design complexities. Since the intellectual property of a design is more and more kept in software-like hardware description languages (HDL), successful reuse depends on the availability of suitable HDL reverse engineering tools. This paper introduces new concepts for an integrated HDL reverse engineering tool-set and presents an implemented evaluation prototype for VHDL designs. Starting from an arbitrary collection of HDL source code files, several graphical and textual views on the design description are automatically generated. The tool-set provides novel hypertext techniques, expressive graphical code representations, a user-defined level of abstraction, and interactive configuration mechanisms in order to facilitate the analysis, adoption and upgrade of existing HDL designs.
View
Identifying high-level components in combinational circuits
Conference Paper
Full-text available
  • Mar 1998
The problem of finding meaningful subcircuits in a logic layout appears in many contexts in computer-aided design. Existing techniques rely upon finding exact matchings of subcircuit structure within the layout. These syntactic techniques fail to identify functionally equivalent subcircuits which are differently implemented optimized, or otherwise obfuscated. We present a mechanism for identifying functionally equivalent subcircuits which is capable of overcoming many of these limitations. Such semantic matching is particularly useful in the field of design recovery
View
Reengineering legacy embedded systems
Article
Full-text available
  • May 1999
Systems that require reengineering are a fact of life in both the commercial and military arenas. The authors have developed a systematic methodology based on virtual prototyping, with accompanying tools and libraries, for rapidly upgrading electronic systems
View
Unveiling the ISCAS-85 benchmarks: A case study in reverse engineering
Article
  • Feb 1999
Designing at higher levels of abstraction is key to managing the complexity of today's VLSI chips. The authors show how they reverse-engineered the ISCAS-85 benchmarks to add a useful, new high-level tool to the designer's arsenal
View
Understanding integrated circuits
Article
  • May 1999
Reverse engineering is the process of learning as much as possible about an IC device by transforming a detailed design description into successively higher levels of abstraction. This tutorial focuses on deriving a module-level description from a gate-level netlist
View
Dealing with obsolete parts
Article
  • May 1999
The US Air Force has launched an initiative to develop an affordable, systematic approach to dealing with obsolete electronic parts. In addition to management and reengineering tools, the initiative is developing reliability models for commercially manufactured electronics used in defense systems
View
Reverse Engineering and Design Recovery: A Taxonomy
Article
  • Feb 1990
The key to applying computer-aided software engineering to the maintenance and enhancement of existing systems lies in applying reverse-engineering approaches. However, there is considerable confusion over the terminology used in both technical and marketplace discussions. The authors define and relate six terms: forward engineering, reverse engineering, redocumentation, design recovery, restructuring, and reengineering. The objective is not to create new terms but to rationalize the terms already in use. The resulting definitions apply to the underlying engineering processes, regardless of the degree of automation applied
View