Well, that's a bit of a sarcasm. Yes you have to have a quite serious lab for that, a level above what most fabless semi companies have, and skills on par with a process developer.

Yet, "firmware recovery" people in China use that regularly to make a living. Hardened/encrypted MCU firmware extraction costs under $20k here.

There are plenty of retrocomputing folks who would be heavily interested in ROM/firmware recovery from "hardened" chips, for entirely legal archival and/or interoperability purposes. $20k would be peanuts for this use case if success could be reasonably assured even in the "hardest" cases.

That sounds kind of nifty.

Any pointers to online info for people interested in finding out more, and/or setting up their own gear for this? :)

Contacting Mr. Steele below may be a good starting point, second after getting into process engineering studies