Technology Opportunities

Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. The reverse engineering of a VLSI device is a two-stage process- extraction of a circuit description from the physical device followed by behavioral model extraction from the circuit description. The first stage involves a sequence of invasive techniques (packaging removal, de-layering, nanoscale imaging etc.) which can be costly and complex. This new non-invasive method enables extraction using simple and inexpensive equipment, such as FPGA board and a computer.