How I reverse engineer a chip

A whirlwind tour of my procedure going from physical chip to annotated die image to schematic to wiki page to you! Some updates since I made this video: I no longer have a Patreon. I ditched them after they started becoming unfriendly to small contributors and small projects by making the fee structure punishing for those. Also, why do this? For me personally, it’s primarily curiosity, a DIY desire to build up skills, my own education, and trying to build a nice library of images on for others to learn from. There are practical applications for more modern chips, namely investigations for patent infringement, and of course competitive research. “Reverse engineering“ doesn’t just mean “I don’t know how this works“, but “I want to find out exactly how this was implemented“. Different chip manufacturers built the same logic chips in different ways and it’s interesting to see the differences. More on the process: * Hot sulfuric acid decapsulation of plastic packages: * Heat decapsulation of ceramic packages: * Reverse engineering a simple CMOS chip: