August 6, 2026
Silicon sleuths, assemble
Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
Jane Street dares the internet to solve a mystery chip, and the comments are losing it
TLDR: Jane Street released a challenge asking people to figure out a mystery chip from its raw physical layout alone. Commenters are equal parts impressed, intimidated, and chaotic, with reactions ranging from "this seems doable" to tales of genius chip hackers and fears about real-world copycat tech drama.
Jane Street has dropped a new geek-bait challenge, and the actual spectacle is the crowd reaction. The company is handing people the visual blueprint of a custom-made computer chip and basically saying: good luck, figure out what this thing does. No labels, no easy clues, just a giant silicon mystery and a promise of swag for the best sleuths. For non-chip people, this is like being given the wiring inside a locked machine and being told to guess its secret job.
The comments immediately split into two camps: the terrifyingly confident puzzle enjoyers and the rest of us, staring in awe. One person declared it "a lot more tractable" than Jane Street’s earlier neural-network brain-melter, while another summed up the public mood more honestly: the people who can solve this are "super-smartypants." That reverence quickly turned spicy, with one commenter swerving into geopolitical thriller mode and joking that this is basically practice for the day stolen advanced chips start getting copied at scale. Casual!
Then came the legend-building. A commenter told a near-mythical story about a university postdoc who allegedly reverse-engineered an NVIDIA chip with oscilloscopes, random inputs, machine learning, and sheer wizard energy, eventually uncovering secret instructions and landing a big career boost. Meanwhile, another commenter asked the most relatable question in the thread: is there a tool that just turns the chip back into readable text already? Honestly, that may be the real mood of the internet here: fascinated, intimidated, and desperately hoping for a shortcut.
There’s also a tiny side-drama: one user is still waiting for a write-up on the last challenge and seems mildly betrayed that the sequel arrived first. In other words, even the puzzle fans have receipts.
Key Points
- •Jane Street released a new puzzle that asks participants to reverse engineer a custom ASIC from its physical layout.
- •The article explains the chip-design pipeline from Verilog code to gate-level netlist, placement and routing, and final GDS output used for fabrication.
- •Participants receive the final mask layers and sample I/O, and must recover a netlist, infer the circuit’s function, and find the final string value.
- •The puzzle includes hints about layout-based functional clues, a nonessential design section, the need to simulate the circuit, and the use of the [success] and [rst_n] signals.
- •A warm-up package with a binary adder, Verilog, netlist, and GDS is provided, and submissions close on September 4, 2026.