Visual6502wiki/The reverse engineering process

Overview

To help explain which state each of our projects is at, here's a description of the steps we follow:

• Get a chip, usually just one of a particular kind but sometimes more
• Depackage the chip
  • Chips with a metal lid or a ceramic sandwich package are preferable since these have no plastic in contact with the die.
  • Chips packaged in plastic must be treated with very hot, very nasty acids which we do at a local laboratory with proper equipment
• Photograph the exposed surface of the chip through a microscope
  • Many separate photographs must be taken to cover the surface at high enough resolution
• Stitch the photographs into a single large image
  • Alignment data is used to correct individual photographs for optical distortions
• Usually, de-layer the chip to reveal hidden or obscured lower features
• Photograph and stitch each layer image
• Align all layer images to each other
• Create polygon models of each part of the chip based on the aligned images
• Convert the polygon data into a description we can simulate
• Investigate the behaviour of the chip by simulation
• Investigate the layout and logic design
• Write up our results on this wiki

Microphotography

Based on our own work and advice from several professionals in the field

• A 20x objective is great, while 100x is overkill and difficult to work with
  • 10x is sometimes adequate for chips with 4 um to 6 um feature sizes, but its better to shoot at higher magnification and downsample the result.
• Useful whole-chip images are typically 6000 to 10000 pixels on a side
• Use an X-Y table to ensure no rotation between the successive images
  • A position readout is not needed, and position information from the microscope is not used to stitch images
• Try to get the chip dead level so its entire surface is in the focal plane
  • A tip-tilt stage with micrometer drive is essential for this, unless you are very patient
• Use a manual fixed exposure, zoom, and white balance for all images
  • Microscopes with a variable zoom are not helpful and could waste a lot of your time later on
• Save images in RAW format if possible at the highest quality
• Aim for at least 200 pixels of overlap between adjacent images

De-layering

Stripping away individual layers of a chip to reveal the parts and features below can be one of the most difficult and even hazardous procedures owing to the chemicals involved and their byproducts.

• Some labs may use repeated mechanical or chemical-mechanical polishing and photography to image successive layers
  • This is more common for modern devices, especially those that have been planarized during manufacture
  • It may be riskier and costlier for the older chips we study which have only a single metal layer and whos surfaces are very irregular
• Plasma etching and various chemicals can be used to remove all the material of a particular layer at once

Resources

Labs:

• Raw Science a lab in the UK who deprocessed and photographed the Spectrum ULA
• 3g forensics a lab in the UK who deprocessed the Tube ULA
• [1] MEFAS, a failure analysis lab mentioned in this posting by Henry of reactivemicro.com on AtariAge forums

Papers and websites:

• [2] Visual6502's PDFs relating to Greg James' presentation at SIGGRAPH 2010
• Degate, GPL software to recover netlist from layout, especially of cell-based designs
• Reverse-Engineering a Cryptographic RFID Tag Usenix paper by Nohl, Evans, Starbug and Plötz
• Reverse-engineering the HP-35 website by Peter Monta
• The Decapping Project website on ROM dumping for MAME
• Silicon Pr0n "A Reverse Engineering Wiki"

Mailing lists, blogs and forum postings:

• Reversing the Tube ULA (destructively) post and thread on the BBC-Micro mailing list. Also found here
• post containing Christian Sattler's advice on photography
• The Decapping Project WIP Page: A Blog About Decapping For MAME

See also our Educational Resources page