Salvaged Silicon is about pulling hardware back from the scrap heap. Enterprise switches, radios, set-top boxes, satellite gear — devices that still work perfectly but were declared dead by the software that shipped with them, or the service that got shut down behind them. The silicon was usually fine. The software was the problem.
The work here is reverse engineering: tearing into undocumented hardware without the NDA datasheets, mapping the registers, and writing the code to make it run again. Two themes run through all of it —
- Reverse engineering — figuring out how undocumented silicon actually works.
- Anti–e-waste — extending the life of hardware that would otherwise be landfill.
Recurring subjects: Broadcom switch ASICs (the BCM56846 / Trident+ teardown), EdgeNOS — a custom network OS built from zero on that silicon without Broadcom's SDK — software-defined radio protocol reversing, and the occasional consumer device that had no business being as interesting as it was.
Who's behind it
I'm Christopher Wright — a hardware reverse-engineering engineer in New Hampshire. By day and night I take apart things that aren't supposed to come apart. Salvaged Silicon is where I write it down.