Beginners Guide to IC Reverse Engineering – With a High Likelihood of Survival! (DS2025)

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. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/de/ about this event: https://talks.datenspuren.de/ds25/talk/CVYPHY/