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Yes. There is exactly that, and we call it an "extraction" tool. It takes a GDS (text representation of shapes in the physical layout), and gives you back a "netlist" (text representation of components and connections in a circuit schematic).

Circuit designers use these tools basically daily for two reasons - the first is Layout Versus Schematic. We want to make sure that the physical layout matches the schematic, so the tool turns the layout GDS into a netlist and compares that to the netlist created from the schematic (basically a diff, but more complicated). The second is so we can run simulations that take into account the "parasitic" resistances and capacitances of the wires and metal shapes in the physical layout. It's basically the same procedure as LVS with an extra step that analyzes the metal shapes to determine said R's and C's.

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yes, but at the transistor level .... it has no idea at that level how those transistors are arranged into gates directly
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The tools can definitely recognize static logic gates purely from the topology (nothing special in the GDS needed). I don't know that I've tested it for anything more complicated, but as you've pointed out, if the hierarchy is in the GDS it's trivial to recover
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I take it back, it's a sky130 .gds the gates are explicitly in there
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In fact if you have the sky130 libraries installed (it's where I'm working) you can get a spice netlist out of it in about 10 seconds - really they should have flattened it
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Practically No, the stack-up of metal layers often hides the gate structures underneath, and the billions of process cells may not all be the same.

Theoretically Yes, as an ion-beam-mill and electron-microscope combination machine can slice up semiconductors layer-by-layer. Given these machines can often also give precise x-ray analysis material data, the exact makeup of the chip can be extracted by competitors given enough time. =3

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Now you're making me imagine some kind of 3D-scanning, confocal x-ray fluorescent spectroscope.

Or maybe some kind of hybrid of x-ray microtomography and spectroscopic analysis all in one.

But, maybe the energies involved would be about the same destructive power as some microtome slicing technique...

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We already know that X-rays don't destroy chips.
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I was thinking of the kind of high-energy photon sources that sprawl across a large laboratory campus behind rings of security fences.

These things can definitely erode the targets. Tomography experiments have to think carefully to optimize the set exposure angles used during a session, because the target degrades more with each shot.

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I’d recommend the Chenming-Hu books on solar cells and semis available as pdfs on his site.

https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/modern-semiconductor-devices-fo...

LLMs have already been shown to cause cognitive/skill performance losses in some users. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axOcn--n_lM

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You're replying to a probably now shadowbanned LLM bot that advertises Fable all day
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Are these "shadow bans" in the room with you right now? What a nut.

Fable needs no advertising. It was more important than the printing press. Code singularity.

But it's old news, Fable is no longer my favorite LLM. I mostly use Kimi k3 now. It's also more competent than you are in general.

The primary point you're avoiding is that programming is not a job for professional humans anymore. At least not humans with any dignity or self respect or economic value.

I'm sure you at least agree with this point, like every other reasonable person does now too.

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> LLMs have already been shown to cause cognitive/skill performance losses in some users. =3

Sorry to interrupt your smugness, but have you actually read that study? It's basically tautological: people remained mostly unfamiliar with code they did not write, and remained mostly unfamiliar with a library they did not use. That's kind of the whole point to begin with! https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html

Unless you want to argue that anyone who cannot code is brain damaged, I'd say it's a bit difficult to suggest that this would amount to any kind of clinically relevant cognitive impairment, much to the contrary of the masses desperately hoping and asserting so. Losing a skill you don't use / want / need is very normal cognitive function.

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