Simulation graphs for reverse engineering
Mathias Soeken, Baruch Sterin, Rolf Drechsler, Robert K. Brayton · 2015
Reverse engineering is the extraction of word level information from a gate-level netlist. It has applications in formal verification, hardware trust, information recovery, and general technology mapping. A preprocessing step finds blocks in a circuit in which word level components are expected. A second step searches for word level components in these blocks. For this second step, we propose two variants of equivalence checking that consider subfunction containment. We propose algorithms to solve these variants by using subgraph isomorphism. A simulation graph (SG) is constructed for the block and for each library component, using a set of permutation-invariant simulation vectors for that component. If a library component SG is a subgraph of the block SG, we have a candidate match, which is then checked by standard equivalence checking. We extend a state-of-the-art subgraph isomorphism algorithm, LAD, to handle simulation graphs efficiently and also propose a SAT-based formulation. Experimental evaluations show that our algorithms can efficiently find 32-bit arithmetic components in blocks with over 300 primary inputs.