Is it possible to reverse engineer a chip design?
ChipWorks has an excellent blog about doing exactly this, with lots of great pictures here.

FlyLogic also has an excellent blog. It is here.

The short answer is it is absolutely possible. IC DIEs are basically really small circuit boards. You can reverse engineer them pretty easily, it just takes a different tool set.

I want to particularly call attention to some posts flylogic did on reverse-engineering ICs (how topical!) here and here.


Image from flylogic website