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Rascals are always sociable, and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others company. Arthur Schopenhauer


Reverse Engineering the Comtech AHA363 PCIe Gzip Accelerator Board

One can never have enough projects going in parallel. And while programming RTL is fun, I also love the whole process of reverse engineering, starting from a board that you don’t know nothing about and step-by-step getting to the point where it becomes something useful.

The FPGA board hack project on Hackaday lists a bunch of commercially available PCBs that have an FPGA in them. Most of them haven’t really been comprehensively reverse engineered.

In this blog post, I’m describing the journey from acquiring the board to getting to the point of doing something useful with it. There is no guarantee of success: at the time of writing this, I haven’t been able to get an LED to blink yet, but I’ve already learned some new techniques that will help me reverse engineer other PCBs in the future, and that might be useful for others as well. Reverse Engineering the Comtech AHA363 PCIe Gzip Accelerator Board