REVERSE ENGINEERING

Reverse engineering, as the name implies, is the reverse of this; in other words, the attempt to recapture the top level specification by analysing the product - "attempt" because it is not possible in practice, or even in theory, to recover everything in the original specification purely by studying the product.

Reverse engineering is difficult and time consuming, but it is getting easier all the time thanks to IT, for two reasons:

• Firstly, as engineering techniques themselves become more computerised, more of the design is due to the computer. Thus, recognisable blocks of code, or groups of circuit elements on a substrate, often occur in many different designs produced by the same computer program. These are easier to recognise and interpret than a customised product would be.
• Secondly, artificial intelligence techniques for pattern recognition, and for parsing and interpretation, have advanced to the point where these and other structures within a product can be recognised automatically.