Huh, that's much cheaper than I thought it would be. Nice to see China reduce costs in that area as well.
I'm guessing those are just the manufacturing costs.
I know people doing that business in China. I can hook you up to people knowing the industry better, and he can hook you up to the correct people. I only do forward engineering, but with some help I can find people good at reverse engineering.
Do you know what is the typical flow for IC reverse engineering?
I'm guessing for older chips they can't just decap it, convert the layers to GDSII and re-send for tape-out, since the process may be obsolete and would need porting, right?
How is that done, exactly? I would guess if they can get the layers into GDSII, it's relatively trivial to run layout extraction to get an equivalent schematic, but that would be a flat netlist.
For something as big as a processor, I'm guessing they would need to do some kind of gate recognition to get a gate-level netlist, which they could then use to do PnR in a different process and standard cell library.
Still, without a higher-level understanding of the design, it would be hard to run any functional verification at all, so how can they guarantee that the re-implemented design will work?
This is a very interesting topic to me...