Story
Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
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Overview
A new puzzle challenges participants to reverse engineer a chip layout without additional information about its function. Modern chips are initially created from code using hardware description languages like Verilog, which are then synthesized into a netlist.
Summary from blog.janestreet.com.
Reports
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blog.janestreet.com
Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
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Community reactions
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Hacker News · blog.janestreet.com
Hacker News discussion ↗
Historical count: 5 · 5 saved in sample · Historical sample
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Based on 5 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-08-07.
- Praise: Getting a logic-gate-level netlist from a GDS is trivial with industry-standard chip design tools — it highlights how accessible modern reverse engineering can be for those in the field.
- Praise: Circuit designers use extraction tools daily, emphasizing the practicality and efficiency of reverse-engineering processes in the semiconductor industry.
- Concern: The original story of reverse engineering a GPU using random inputs is far-fetched and misrepresents the complexities involved in ASIC reverse engineering.
- Concern: Commenters overwhelmingly agree that applying random current inputs to modern GPUs is absurd, as they have too much state for such simplistic methods to yield results.
- Concern: The claim that one could reverse engineer a GPU by connecting oscilloscopes is met with skepticism, revealing a lack of understanding of the intricacies of digital logic.