How I reverse engineer a chip
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- Опубликовано: 2 окт 2024
- 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 project5474.org 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: • Decapsulating a plasti...
* Heat decapsulation of ceramic packages: • Decapsulating a cerami...
* Reverse engineering a simple CMOS chip: • Reverse engineering a ...
This seems like some sort of lost art.
I worked for TI back in 1972-74 and was part of the design team that designed many of the LS series of parts, including this one.
This is really one nice comment to find on youtube, LS chips have been used all over the world as an introduction for electronics and still in use, I really hope you feel nice knowing that your work helped me out to get into electronics and a lot of people out there too, thank you sir.
@@nandoedwin1 Thanks for the reply.
I worked at TI for about 6 years, Also for Apple Computer for 5 years and Dell Computer for 1 year. I was the battery expert at Dell. BTW, some of the TI Chips will have my initials on the die.
Did the same thing with the devices which I helped to develop in the 70's and 80's @@k5at A skilled craftsperson likes to leave a mark. 😉 It's sometimes amazing how small and unobtrusive a signature you can leave.
@@k5at OMG this is so cool. I bought LS chips to build my Ben Eater style 8 bit computer
"Although it might not look like it, some steps can take days" he says. Well, it does look like most steps can take days. Amazing work.
This is your daily dose of Recommendation
Reverse engineering chips
Yeah and this is quite fun to watch
Thanks RUclips
@@Rainbow__cookie yeah. Thx RUclips.
Beats the TMZ news abt Kylie Jenner that was just recommended to me
This is lie when I encountered painting restorations. Quite relaxing.
@@millanferende6723 yess. Such relacc
1986: we will gonna have flying cars in the 2020s
2020s: we will try to reverse EVERY 80s chip
wish we could write messages in doritos xd
ruclips.net/video/y4qf4s19Aog/видео.html FIRST PERSONAL MULTICOPTER WAS TESTED IN THE USA
this is too real
quality comment right here
Think nasa could go to the moon today?
I feel like there's a huge gap between "here's a high quality image of each layer" and "here's the chip reverse engineered".
i was hoping for more, too. Interesting nontheless :)
Well, I guess this is not true for the pure TTL devices. There is not too much voodoo on those chips
@Fez Paladin Check out EEVBlog. Dave does some videos on reverse engineering circuit boards. While they're larger and easier to see, the principle remains the same(or very similar). He's also quite comical to watch.
You can identify transistors visually and trace out the interconnect. It's not that hard... Just a bit tedious.
@@dfs-comedy Dianne, please see my hundreds of upvotes and every single reply to my comment other than you having no idea to please realise you might not know how hard something that you can do easily is.
Thank you for doing this for the EE community and future generations.
As someone who learm EE i can say google is scaring me cus how did they know i learn EE
Adhwa Hazim KATERIMEIKA RIKAZIKIRIN Zulkifli hopefully you’re not learning in an English speaking country
@@harrisons62 luckily i live in Malaysia, so our mother tongue is not English, but our secondary compulsory language is English ahahah
@@princeedhwardhezmi6469 google is always listening to u
This is quite informative.
This would be amazing if you could do this for the Gameboy MBC(memory bank controllers)
and the Gameboy Advance custom Arm7tdmi.
Holy smokes. I've used computers for a long time. But not as much on the circuit board and chip level. Seeing your photo results and describing the lay out of the chip was really eye opening for me. Also I've never seen the different layers like that before. Very cool. Thank you.
Thank you so much for contributing so much to the community !
People like you make this world possible
That's so beautiful work, you can explain some of the basics of electronics engineering.
Wow didn't know about ICE program. I am a photographer and make panoramas, I think this will be my new tool of choice.
Real Talk? Yep, it works, and it's FREE 😃😃
Me: learning chip design ...and
RUclips recommends this video
jup, they are listening. always.
just last weekend i discussed the fall of the soviet union with my dad. one day later, youtube recommends me the tagesschau from 89 (fall of DDR).
@@vinigretzky97 or he made some research on Google
@@miche4444 we don't trust you GLaDOS
Same. ECE student.
Me:Doing nothing.
RUclips: Hey do you want to know how he does this?
that's insane, blows my mind away.
How much affort someone has to required in order to do that?!?!?
thanks man.
Hi Robert, to answer your question : Yes I enjoyed very much your video.
I fell on it on youtube, and it's exactly what I would have dreamt of, without even trying to ask :
You are here describing in high details, th work cycle of professional hardware engineering. Maybe I'll have an opportunity to explain you why, I was digging everywhere to find that.
Many thanks for your excellent work : I know how much work it is to make videos that feel so easy and informative at the same time
Jean-Baptiste
I’d love to see this chip built out onto a pcb. That would be cool.
this kind of bipolar oldies (used sometimes nowadays), 74LS**, have an equivalent circuit quite often sketched on the datasheet... CMOS ones may have a bit of problems more, since the mosfets are not a standard type, they are specifically engeneered for complementary operation... you can use in that case a CD4007 to have some "free" mosfets for the use, but that chip is.... already a chip
Hmm yes of course
@@redoverdrivetheunstoppable4637 exacly why make a chip with a chip actually it can be usefull if the chip is just multiple chip in 1 but in this case its not its a circuit of transistor and resistor that need a plastic case to not die instantly because of ambient noise
Que bueno que encontre tu canal, tenes publicadas muchas cosas interesantes! Saludos desde argentina!
Wow ! Very interesting and well made ! Thanks a lot for sharing !
Thank you. You are a very patient person.
It took several hours in college for us to learn this art, but you explained it in just 5 minutes.
Great video.
You learned this in college?
It would be epic if you reverse engineered the Amiga custom chipset. But that would take a very long time and cost a bit. Especially now the chips are getting rarer.
Never seen any content like this...I really appreciate this awesome work...(new sub to ur channel, hope I get awesome deconstructions & many more)😊
Watching this makes me feel like the most unintelligent being in earth ...
Well Sir you are not.
The most unintelligent species on Earth are those who think the human brain that invented this chip is a result of a co-incidence. :)))
Impressive... he's the type of person that keeps humanity moving forward.
lil hotdog I just thinking the same!
congratulations, you have achieved the nerdiest hobby to ever exist
Thank you for a good laugh, Nathan.
That's not a lot of work... that's a lot of QUALITY work!! Woow man, great article and video, thanks for sharing!
I don't understand it, but I admire the technical prowess.
Oh man, how much I need the SC01-A chip from Votrax reversed engineered. ........
That would really save a lot of pinball enthusiasts. .......
2:48 now that's new, i never knew there is a program like that on microsoft.... hahahaha
This is for low to medium scale integration. Modern CPU's have feature widths less than the wavelength of visible light and can't be optically resolved. These lines turn into iridescent colors much like the coloring of many butterflies. A modern CPU chip contains many more layers covering the lower layers so individual transistor elements can not be seen. The ability to see individual lines started to end with chips getting features smaller than 1 micron.
Man, I don't know, what the hell are you talking about 😂
you do not know what about 74ls01 ? The chip Quad 2-input positive-NAND gates with open collector outputs??
@@danr2652 Hehehe, no, I don't know... Can you please explain? 😉
What a beautiful work station. I wish I had something of the same caliber. Great video Robert!
This is amazing! I never realized this was even possible...
Fantastic work that is done, like it, makes technology more futher possible
Beautiful work.
This is nice, but how can you reverse engineered a chip with thousands of transistors and not only a few dozens ? Is it possible to automate some kind of image recognition algorithm to draw all the chip from high quality picture ? In brief how does this scale to more complex chip ?
Install Gentoo
That line of work would drive me f#cking mad..
The movie Paycheck comes to mind looking at your work.
As someone in their second year of EET at college, this blows my mind.
quit while you're ahead, kid
I would extract the files for a ULTIMATE MORTAL KOMBAT 3 PCB BOARD PLCC also. I need the files from the U47 AND U45 on the board.
I thought it's intel i-series chips and I was like how could it even possible
You sound like Afrotechmods!
Who on earth would dislike this? Nice one my friend! Have an awesome day!
Ever think about powering the dies up? Things like optoisolators would be interesting.
I use a stack shot macro stage which makes things easy.
Hello My name is Marco and i would like to know if you can reverse engineer a custom MORTAL KOMBAT 2 PLCC chip? I would like to extract the file off of it in order to protect the game for the future.
I miss the late 80s early 90s. Best music ever.ps this guy could be extremely Dangerous If he wanted to. I hope people understand the level of smartness that he is demonstrating
You do wonderful precise work that requires high resolution and you use jpeg? A lossy format?
Great job you've done there....This is something new I learnt today......Keep it up
Im a student, so all i can give you is like..
If you are real student, stop messing with games
@@canss1951 what lmao
Your work is amazing and immensely appreciated by those of us who like to know, but can not afford to.
Robert
Nice work, thanks for the video.
However, I have one question... Why?
Outstanding work !!!
'Export to .jpeg' ,... might as well draw your chip with a mouse in paint 😂😂🤣
Very clever! That looks like a heck load of work mate
Omg please we need high res layered die shots of the gameboys (dmg) cpu rev b chip. Please by gods sake.
Excellent work and processes
Very cool! Nice work!
now Reverse engeniring on i7 9900K or AMD rayzen 3950X xD
SLEVIN SHAFEL then he will be in mental hospital .
I have to say reverse engineering a 74 TTL is not worth the time. The datasheets give you pictures of the die!
Wow great work no longer just on the surface I guess the innovation is the word micro since I can make that in kicad
amazing work
In the mid 80s a company came to where I worked selling their product LVS layout v schematic. they dis design verification of the physical layers - they converted the image to transistor fully by a program. I asked if he thought it would be hard to convert the transistors to gates. He said it was possible. Then I asked him if he knew what my company does. He said no. I told him that we take gate and board level designs in what ever primitives are for that technology and convert them to generic gates. Then we raise the symantic level to adders registers, ... and then ew replace these macro level components with hand optimized target technology macros. then we convert all the remaining generics to target tech. primitives and then go to the physical layout and polygon phase. He didn’t get what I was saying. In the mid 80s the technology existed to completely reverse engineer a chip and target it to a whole new technology without even knowing what it does, even to the point of duplicating design errors all programmatically
What is the purpose of reverse engineering old chips?
Respect!
Have a list of sought after chips? Fans might have laying around for you.
Amazing video! Always wondered how this was done. Thanks.
This video is really above top flight! Thank you! Is there a way to make a chip inexpensively or have it done inexpensively. I don't mean anything too complex. If you click on my channel icon on the left, you can see my Self Contained Ion Powered Aircraft. I would like to make some electronic parts for it that weigh less (on a very particular scale) and are more mass producible than wired components. Any ideas on how to do that inexpensively would be much appreciated. Thanks ahead of time!
Great work
This is the first video I've come across that you've made. Now I'm going to check out the decapping video and more!
thanks for all your hardwork :)
my mother would now say: "You broke the chip ? Stop wasting money"
Tell her to appreciate science and progress not just material things ?
lois
amazing , but why? what comes after that?
Do produce your own chips later on?
or modify the existing ones?
It would be so cool if some of this chip’s authors would come here in the comments to point out on your mistakes (if there are some at all)
You're a magician!!! This is incredible!!!
Can you do this with an ISL9240?
Fascinating!
Hi Robert. I need code extracted from a PIC16C58B 04/P chip and then copied to a few other chips. They are from an obsoleted motor controller board and I want to keep parts on hand for repairing this board. I'm willing to pay, can you or anyone else help me?
Amazing work.
I remember the big softcover books that TI made to describe their chips, the LS172 was a popular one.
Holy shit! That's alot of work!👍👍
Ok, how the heck did this blow up over the past two weeks? Can't be hackaday, they already covered this two years ago. I don't have SoundCloud or a Patreon (I ditched them a while ago) so instead imagine a kitten playing with a paper bag.
Setup your patreon again mate asap
It’s showing up in my feed as a recommended video.
Please do for snapdragon 855 chip
I thought it was Fedora Linux but then it's Windows? Any suggestion of CAD software for Linux? (don't need anything fancy, just draw lines and copy/paste for the most part)
Thank you for being so thorough. This is awesome.
i love that people like you do these things and make videos like this!
thank you for your amazing work
Very interesting. I've always wondered how these are made and what they looking inside. Please forgive my ignorance but what is your purpose for doing this? Hobby? Rebuilds?
Probably as a hobby and a informative video, but results are impressive since this was a chip with manufactured in the late 70s and 80s. However, tech has advance so much more nowadays and chips this size can have millions o billions of transistors while this older chip just have a couple of them
The chinese do this to make counterfeit chips.
"reverse engineered" is this 1 part of a series?
awesome job keep it up sir
I thought you reverse engineered a potato chip.
this microchip has the performance of a potato, though.
WOW. Interesting and hard to reverse engineering to a chip.
You should export to PNG, not JPEG. No matter how high quality a jpeg is it will have artifacts due to compression. PNG doesn't have compression so less distortion or artfacts on the final image
great job ! That's a lot of work
nice work
nice work
This is absolutely great work. However, is this merely a hobby, to informationally deconstruct for fun (along the same lines as trivia?) Or is there a practical angle to doing all this? Is there a benefit? Thank you!
It took so long for youtube to recommend channel like this. I lovw your diy things.
I appreciate your work,though it reminds me of that hard days` of work decades ago in which I struggled with some intel`s chips to immitate their layout patterns,of course under the license.But our processing technology those days were not so sufficient to get originals` performace that we had to manage somehow manipulating layout patterns.
Looking for your originally designed chips to come on video near future.
Hi there! i really love the series you started with where you build a cpu on an fpga, but it seems it is not quite finished. are you ever planning on making part 7 and beyond? would really love to see the conclusion and eventual playing of zirk on that fpga :D
ps. i hope this is ok to comment on this video about a different video since comments are disabled for all those 6 parts :(
hope to hear for you about that part 7! :D
Well, so far I've been working on project5474 exclusively. I don't really know when I'll get back to the FPGA project.
I like your content, wish your videos were a bit longer. If it takes days, some b-roll is prime for a montage
I always wondered how some Chinese companies were so good at reverse engineering! Now I know
They usually don't reverse engineer ships. PCBs yeah, but seldom ships. The trick is that a quite a bit of chips and other components go missing from factory production lines. Counted as faulty products.
But why would someone want to reverse engineer a 1980's chip?
TO LEARN
Try it......
let's say , Start with Zilog Z80 For example
download the datasheet and go from there
get yourself a DSO and a Logic Analyzer and breadboard and start testing away and reverse engineering i and building it up from scratch
after a while, you'll understand why we do i .
@@martinkuliza .... Fair Enough ... for the Joy of Knowledge.... I won't be joining in but at least I now know why.Thanks.
@SuperLuckyLad, There are many chips that are out of production that were used in guitar pedals, rack electronics for studio use, or proprietary chips that have no documentation (secret). So if there is ever an economic way of reproducing theses chips in the future or even virtually, you could recreate some long lost electronics. You would be amazed at the prices that some old electronics can fetch, due to their rarity and inability to reproduce what they do today.
@@Cpt_Adama its not necessary cause chips like arduino that you can "program" in order to process any type of data ...