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Reverse Engineering of VLSI for Equipment Safety
Authors
	Cheremisinov D.I.
	Cheremisinova L.D.
Date of publication
	2022
DOI
	10.31114/2078-7707-2022-3-10-17
Abstract
	VLSI reverse engineering is a powerful tool used in design verification to increase the performance of hardware simulation tools, as well as in detection of injected hardware illegal insets in the design and manufacturing process. The task of VLSI reverse engineering is to re-create the device specification by analyzing its hardware implementation in the form of VLSI. Reverse engineering is based on the decompilation of a flat transistor circuit netlist, which con-sists in recognition (extraction) of high-level structures in circuits at the transistor level and obtaining a representation at the logical level, equivalent to the original flat description at the transistor level. The most common style of logic is con-sidered – logical complementary MOS structures. Graph based methods and software tools are proposed for solving some key problems arising at the decompilation stage of transistor circuits: partitioning a graph into connectivity components corresponding to transistor subcircuits; recognition of subcircuits that are logical elements, and functions implemented by them; recognizing topologically equiv-alent transistor subcircuits; forming a library of recognized gates and constructing first two-level transistor circuit, then functionally equivalent logical network. It is assumed that the decompiled circuit, in addition to recognizable CMOS elements and pass gates, may also contain other structures that are distinguished during decompilation as pseudo-elements (not CMOS gates), as well as individual transistors.The original flat and resulting two-level transistor circuits are presented in SPICE format, logical networks in SF, VHDL or Verilog formats. The developed decompilation program has been tested on practical transistor-level circuits and has sufficient speed to process circuits with more than 100 thousand transistors in a few minutes on a personal computer. Two practical examples of reverse engineering of transistor circuits are described.
Keywords
	CMOS transistor circuits, transistor subcircuit extraction, logic gate recognition, SPICE format
Library reference
	Cheremisinov D.I., Cheremisinova L.D. Reverse Engineering of VLSI for Equipment Safety // Problems of Perspective Micro- and Nanoelectronic Systems Development - 2022. Issue 3. P. 10-17. doi:10.31114/2078-7707-2022-3-10-17
URL of paper
	http://www.mes-conference.ru/data/year2022/pdf/D021.pdf