Digital designers normally proceed from behavioral specification to logic circuit; rarely do they need to go in the reverse direction. One such situation is examined here: recovering the high-level specifications of a popular set of benchmark logic circuits. The authors present their methodology and experience in reverse engineering the ISCAS-85 circuits. They also discuss a few of the practical uses of the resulting high-level benchmarks and make them available for other researchers to use.

John P. Hayes, Mark C. Hansen, Hakan Yalcin, "Unveiling the ISCAS-85 Benchmarks: A Case Study in Reverse Engineering", IEEE Design & Test of Computers, vol. 16, no. , pp. 72-80, July-September 1999, doi:10.1109/54.785838