
There are companies (one in Canada, as I recall) which specialize in
analyzing chips to understand process technology, design rules,
... to understand the probable yield of the assembly line making them,
and therefore the probable current cost and possible future cost curves,
given design shrinks, statistical quality control -> better yields, etc.

Taiwanese, Japanese and especially Korean semiconductor manufacturers
have all (korea continues) reverse-engineered foreign chips and
produced the chip.  Taiwan and Japan have signed intellectual
property treaties, and now at least extract the gate/transitor level
design before laying the chip out again.  The koreans still
use mask-level copying, I believe.  At least, they are under a lot
of pressure to pass laws to meet international intellectual property
standards.

All this despite lots of attempts to hide the designs.  There are lots
of techniques to do so in both hardware and software design.

For a complex chip, there will be real intellectual effort extracting
the gate design from the transistor design, and the algorithm from
the gate design.  But it won't take two smart guys even 6 months, working
40 hour weeks.  Koreans work 60 or more 8)

Lew