[near]

It is, but these cores are almost exclusively not being done that way. Not yet at least. I hope that they will be, that would be really awesome. I paid $1200 last year for the SNES PPUs to be decapped for this purpose, but it's a truly enormous undertaking to map out those chips and then recreate it in Verilog. You're talking thousands of hours of work per chip. If anyone reading this is able to help with that effort, please do let me know, we could really use the help.

[FPGAhacker]

Not that this is necessarily helpful to you in the short term, but it strikes me as a good problem for machine learning (going from die pictures to transistor schematic.)

[tediousdemise]

By decapped, do you mean delidded?

Theoretically it would be possible to automate this with a couple things:

- USB electron microscope to image the transistor topology

- CV lib to identify connections and generate corresponding Verilog code

[klodolph]

“Decapping” is a more intense version of delidding where you use chemical agents or something similarly extreme (laser, plasma, milling) to remove the package (ceramic, plastic).

My understanding is that there are people who do it often enough that it is automated in the way you describe, but you still need someone with a lot of skill to spend serious time on it. Computer vision works wonders but there are errors which must be identified and fixed.

A lot of the chips people care about are can just be done optically, no electron microscope needed.

[tediousdemise]

Ah, that’s a good distinction. I’d be pretty scared of damaging the hardware by doing that, but I’m sure there are some really experienced folks out there that would appreciate the hardware donation.

[klodolph]

Decapping destroys the hardware.