# Reverse-engineer an ASIC from its chip layout

DevFeed: [Reverse-engineer an ASIC from its chip layout](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/can-you-reverse-engineer-an-asic-20156.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-reverse-engineer-an-asic/>)

Author: Anish Singhani

Published: 2026-08-05T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Jane Street](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/jane-street.md>)

Topics: [Hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/hardware.md>), [Reverse Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/reverse-engineering.md>), [Verilog](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/verilog.md>), [Routing (disambiguation)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/routing.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>)

Tags: [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [design-automation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/design-automation.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hardware.md>), [puzzle](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/puzzle.md>), [reverse-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/reverse-engineering.md>), [routing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/routing.md>), [signal](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/signal.md>)

## AI overview

Jane Street presents a puzzle that challenges readers to reverse-engineer an ASIC from its physical chip layout, recover the underlying netlist, determine the circuit's purpose, and derive a final answer from its output.

## Source excerpt

Earlier this year we published a puzzle that handed you a complete neural network and asked you to figure out what it did. The response was great, so we've made another one! This time, we're going much deeper down the tech stack. For this puzzle we've designed a chip, but we're only giving you the layout. A crash course in how chips get made Modern chips start life as code.