Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?

At my uni, 15 years ago, one postdoc reverse engineered NVIDIA chip and wrote more performant compiler. He did that by connecting oscyloscops to all chip's outputs and started with applying random current on inputs. Using ML and his genius he rediscoverd all opcodes including a few hidden ones. Eventually he got hired by some company that was doing a lot of GPU on supercomputers.

Is this the chip they used to steal money from the Indian stock market until they got banned from India?

Is there something like an Extract-SPICE tool that takes a circuit and gives you back a text rendering of it ?

looks like they didn't post any blog post about 2nd NN challenge (https://huggingface.co/spaces/jane-street/droppedaneuralnet)

I was waiting for some writeup about permutation decyphering

In a simplified scenario (not too far from this)? Yeah, we've done that in CTFs almost a decade ago.

https://blog.dragonsector.pl/2017/10/?m=1

That sounds like a fun challenge. Feels a lot more tractable than the neural net one.

people who can do this stuff are super-smartypants

but reminds me how we're going to find out on an industrial level when the Saudis give China some nvidia chips they were grifted

they've cloned lots of chips before but nothing that advanced