OT Extracting code from chips, deompiling
What is the current status of things.
1) Primarily, if a chip has computer code burned into it, can the code be retrieved by someone in possession of the chip?**2) Assuming the answer to 1 is yes, what is the state of decompiling? Without the comments and data types, how often can the logic or the exact pre-compiled code be determined well enough to make one's own devices?
**Related to this, 3) can the circuity in an IC or LSIC, intergrated circuit or iirc large scale integrated circuit, be determined by disassembling the IC?Is stealing design secrets harder than when everything was mechanical? Much harder? Impossible?