Reverse Engineering The ARM ALU


arm600From the image, he worked out the transistor structures and how they map to gates. Since the ARM is a 32-bit processor, there are 32 separate slices of the ALU, each with about 70 transistors (see below). There are slight differences between certain slices to support zero and carry propagation. A PLA generates control signals that route data through the ALU to perform the desired operation.

[Dave] was inspired by the visual6502 project as well as [Ken Shirriff’s] 8085 reverse engineering, both of which we’ve covered in the past. If the FET transistor logic isn’t to your liking, you could always try Minecraft.


21 thoughts on “Reverse Engineering The ARM ALU

  1. Interesting write-up. Silicon chips are a work of art. Reverse engineering on the silicon level likewise.

    Acorn doesn’t produce any chips themselves. They sell the IP. Its up to the fabricators to turn the IP in to real chips. Some of the IP are available in VHDL or “blackbox”. I’ve used ARM-cores before in an FPGA. I’m wondering if it would possibly be easier to rip the files generated for the FPGA than reverse engineering the silicon. The output will change with the optimisation settings… So it will not be exactly the same.

    Other than that writing a behavioural model in VHDL would give the same functionality.

          1. Thanks. I had looked at that before, but looking again, I see there’s a useful chapter on v1/v2 differences, called “Overview of the 26 bit architectures” that explains the differences.

    1. I have the “Dab Hand Guide to ARM assembler” by dabs press. It just covers the simpler 26-bit addressed ARM.

      The earlier ARM cpu’s had no thumb mode, only one spare set of registers for FIQ interrupts; only byte and long word addressing (no half-word access); condition codes were combined with PC , the top 6 bits so that a return would always restore them.

      1. You say that, but barrel-shift for free on every instruction was a new (and very useful) thing.

        To wring real speed out the ARM1, you also needed linear code (no cache), so barrel-shift and conditionalisation on every instruction was a major help.

Leave a Reply to Artenz Cancel reply

