{"id":15829,"date":"2026-03-12T21:12:38","date_gmt":"2026-03-13T04:12:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=15829"},"modified":"2026-03-14T17:22:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T00:22:09","slug":"emulating-audio-ics-from-microscope-scanning-the-chip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=15829","title":{"rendered":"Emulating audio IC’s – from scanning the chip with a microscope"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Giulioz gives a sequel to last year’s talk “Proprietary silicon ICs and dubious marketing claims? Let’s fight those with a microscope!<\/a>“, where he showed how he reverse engineered a pretty old device by looking at microscope silicon pics alone, with manual tracing and some custom tools. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast forward, he shows how he reverse engineered a much modern chip: the custom Roland\/Toshiba TC170C140 ESP chip (1995). Completing this task required a different approach, as doing it manually would have required too much time. He used a guided, automated approach that combines clever microscopy with computer vision to automatically classify standard cells in the chip, saving us most of the manual work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They then sped things up even further by directly probing the chip: by exploiting test routines and sending random data to the chip he figured out how the internal registers worked to create a bit-accurate emulator. He even gives the source code out on github so you can emulate the devices yourself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listen to the result at 32:19 where they play Darude Sandstorm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n