Going from the masks to circuitry is straightforward. I wrote a program that turns the masks into connected components, finds transistors, and organizes the tra

Going from the masks to circuitry is straightforward. I wrote a program that turns the masks into connected components, finds transistors, and organizes the transistors into gates. The harder problem is starting with die photos rather than clean masks. I did a few experiments with machine learning and TensorFlow but I couldn't get anything useful out of it. One problem is that every chip I look at is very different in how it looks under the microscope. By the time you manually create enough training data, you're halfway done with the chip. And then I couldn't get good results from the machine learning (which is probably my fault, not a fundamental issue).