2025-09-21 –, Henny-Brenner-Saal
Language: English
Peel back IC layers: decapping, delayering, imaging, and analysis for curious beginners.
My curiosity often knows no bounds, especially when it comes to understanding how things work. That’s why I’ve often wondered how certain ICs function internally and how one can uncover their secrets. This curiosity led me to start exploring the world of chip reverse engineering, even without any prior experience. After several mishaps (and a few rather risky experiments), I finally achieved my first results and found myself falling ever deeper down the rabbit hole.
While researching techniques, I discovered the Siliconpr0n community—a group of brilliant, friendly, and incredibly helpful fellow nerds who shared their knowledge and made the steep learning curve much more manageable.
In this talk, I will show how to "safely" decap and delayer chips with minimal effort—often right at your kitchen table, or better, in a well-ventilated space such as a balcony. I will introduce the essential tools and techniques for beginners, demonstrate how to capture usable images, and explain simple methods for analyzing chip structures. The presentation will include practical examples from the Siliconpr0n community and provide insight into the current projects of others.
Just your average nerd with a suspiciously strong bias toward hardware. Physically incapable of leaving any device unopened — right down to individual ICs, whose dies somehow always end up under a microscope. Has an incurable love for anything that transmits, an obsession with building antennas, and the inexplicable habit of keeping SMA connectors on hand “just in case.”
Possesses an unshakable need to build things that could just as easily be bought. And when it’s not hardware, you’ll probably find him poking at binaries or tackling the occasional crackme.