The use of digital image processing for IC reverse engineering

IC Reverse engineering is the process to analyze an integrated circuit to obtain information about its design, materials, logic circuitry, functionality, performance and other relevant features. The increasingly complexity of microchips using a greater number of layers and logic gates makes this process unaffordable when using traditional methods that rely on human inspection and analysis. Therefore, digital image processing is presented as a fruitful field for automation. In this paper a system for the circuitry extraction, analysis and presentation is described. It is divided in three blocks: 2D Image Tiling, Logic Gates Localization & Recognition and Microchip Navigator. The paper presents an overview of the complete system and is mainly based on the description of the image processing algorithms that are applied to the different blocks such as image stitching, customized Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and logic gate localization & recognition.