Diving into Silicon for the First Time

I remember in the early 90s walking into the board room of a small semiconductor company who was building a chip I had designed, they had a photomicrograph of IBM's VGA chip completely covering the table and a team of summer hires from UC Santa Cruz essentially doing what this article describes.

They weren't so much reverse engineering the chip to copy it, they'd already designed one from specs, they were looking for hidden undocumented functionality, features that might be released after they had built and shipped their design