ASIC Forensic Redesign

Crossfield proposes an innovative forensic approach for re-engineering legacy devices based upon using a mechanical/ion-etch (dry etch) process to extract transistor and transistor interconnect data. This transistor netlist data is then fed through an extract program to establish a gate level netlist from the transistor and transistor interconnect database. The gate level netlist, together with a minimal set of electrical and functional knowledge supplied by the end user, is used with a novel standard cell library that can be "updated" to reflect a specific older process technology. The forensic process can be used on gate arrays as well as standard cell based ASICs.