Travis Goodspeed - Writing a Mask ROM Tool

Suppose that you have a photograph of the bits in a microchip, and you want to reverse engineer the firmware. This talk describes how I built a CAD tool in C and Qt6 for annotating and decoding the bits. After chemically decapsulating, delayering, and staining a microchip, its ROM can be photographed to reveal the physical bits. This talk will describe how I wrote an open tool in Qt6 and C for annotating these photographs to painlessly extract tens of thousands of bits for reverse engineering. This talk describes Mask ROM Tool, a CAD tool for converting photographs of bits in a microchip and then converting them to a ROM image suitable for reverse engineering or emulation.