There are rumors (rumours to please our UK friends) that some companies will do it with xray/UVlight and such for a couple of thousand dollars. I neither have nor want any knowledge thereof, if someone wants to steal, do not tell me. The safety against theft is much more in the code structure than in the lock bits. The only case where I have worked backwards was a case where an employee destroyed all material upon resigning, but those chips were not locked.

The real question is: will a competitor spend thousands and thousands of dollars to break your code?. If he does, he usually end up spending more that it would cost to develop from scratch. In the above mentioned case I spent a week or two on disassembling etc. realized the futility and then started from scratch.

Erik