Jane Street ASIC Reverse Engineering Challenge: A Month-Long Deep Dive
Original: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
Why This Matters
Highlights growing hobbyist interest in hardware-level security and chip reverse engineering skills.
A developer spent roughly a month solving Jane Street's ASIC reverse engineering challenge, which asks participants to analyze a GDS chip design file and determine its function. The solver built a custom circuit simulator, a hardware description language parser, and a test harness from scratch before ultimately decoding the hidden output.
Jane Street periodically publishes technical challenges, and its ASIC reverse engineering puzzle prompted one developer to embark on a month-long effort documented on their personal tech blog. The challenge provides a GDS (chip layout) file and asks solvers to work backwards to understand what the circuit does — with a VCD simulation file also included for the main puzzle.
Rather than using established tooling immediately, the developer began by manually inspecting the GDS files with Python's gdstk library, identifying 27 cells in the warmup puzzle. They also wrote a small C program to parse the VCD file, which produced the output 'TRY AGAIN' — confirming that the circuit encodes readable messages.
The developer then went on a multi-week detour, building a custom circuit simulator using SQLite3 as a backend, writing a hardware description language parser, and developing a test harness — all before eventually adopting the existing waveform viewer 'Surfer.' The blog post describes this process as driven by 'hard-headedness and sleep deprivation.' Code is available on the developer's GitHub. Jane Street's original challenge post is titled 'Can you reverse Engineer an ASIC?'