You may have seen those highly magnified photos of decapped chips displaying the hardware architecture and wondered what information is represented by the solder-like designs.

Adam “Major Malfunction” Laurie of Aperature Labs has developed a software tool to assist in deciphering the bits represented in these highly magnified chip photos. Known as rompar, its a Python tool for semi-automatic extraction of data from microscopic images of masked ROM.

For more photos and project details visit Aperature Labs.