Specifications for the development of an expert tool for the automatic optical understanding of electronic circuits: VLSI reverse engineering

Deals with the specifications for the development of an expert tool for the automatic optical detection and recognition of the connectivity among devices in digital electronic circuits and the understanding of the circuits functionality. In particular, the proposed tool, called ANTISTROFEAS, uses expert knowledge recognizing and understanding electronic circuits without the use of their associated database. The ANTISTROFEAS tool will use classical picture processing methods in combination with heuristics and knowledge acquisition schemes. The expert tool proposed is used for understanding of ´unknown´ electronic circuits, or where the complexity of the circuit is too great, so that any human searching effort requires long time for reliable results.<>