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So, my spouse was a CPU designer at AMD for many years and now does secure computing work for, well, the US government. I showed her your comment. She laughed.

So, my spouse was a CPU designer at AMD for many years and now does secure computing work for, well, the US government. I showed her your comment. She laughed. A lot. This is all completely wrong.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
baybal2 7y ago
Well, that's a bit of a sarcasm. Yes you have to have a quite serious lab for that, a level above what most fabless semi companies have, and skills on par with a process developer. Yet, "firmware recovery" people in China use that regularly to make a living. Hardened/encrypted MCU firmware extraction costs under $20k here.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  There are plenty of retrocomputing folks who would be heavily interested in ROM/firmware recovery from "hardened" chips, for entirely legal archival and/or interoperability purposes. $20k would be peanuts for this use case if success could be reasonably assured even in the "hardest" cases.
- justinclift 7y ago
  That sounds kind of nifty. Any pointers to online info for people interested in finding out more, and/or setting up their own gear for this? :)
  - baybal2 7y ago
    Contacting Mr. Steele below may be a good starting point, second after getting into process engineering studies