[baybal2]

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]

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]

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]

Contacting Mr. Steele below may be a good starting point, second after getting into process engineering studies