Emulation of vintage integrated circuits through die analysis and reverse-EDA

Cole Johnson explains how to extract transistor-level netlists from silicon die photographs to emulate vintage integrated circuits in FPGAs.

Cole Johnson Despite being sold in the millions, video games based on discrete game ICs have had minimal emulation developed. This is primarily due to the circuitry being a literal "black box" as only the manufacturer possessed the designs. In addition, much of the documentation surrounding these games has disappeared over the years. Cole has been developing a process to re-implement these stubborn circuits in modern FPGAs as well as software. It involves extracting a transistor-level netlist from high-resolution photographs of the exposed silicon die. Reverse-engineering and slow simulation is achieved using tools pioneered by the visual6502 project. This is followed by reverse-EDA performed by custom tools being developed. The transistor-level design is automatically converted into a more abstract RTL circuit description. Verilog obtained from the above process will be ported to the tinyFPGA board, the MiSTer hardware emulation project, and the MAME software emulator. The intermediate files will be open-source in the spirit of the target projects. The FOSSi Foundation is proud to announce Latch-Up, a conference dedicated to free and open source silicon to be held over the weekend of May 4th and 5th in Portland, Oregon, USA. Latch-Up: a weekend of presentations and networking for the open source digital design community, much like its European sister conference ORConf. Produced by NDV: youtube.com/channel/UCQ7dFBzZGlBvtU2hCecsBBg?sub_confirmatio… OpenHardware Sat May 4 18:00:00 2019 at Revolution Hall