Every MCU that I have worked with, that can be programmed and then locked, can be erased - recovered - and reprogrammed. So with these types there is no locking oneself out of the chip. If you do happen to have a chip that has a one way lock then just toss it into the trash and fetch a fresh one.

Despite any type of rights or legality issues I can think of only one reason to want to read the protected binary code out of a locked microcontroller. That reason is because you have no other means to directly recreate that binary content from source or archived programming files.

So there can be no argument; if you need to recreate and if you do not have the source IP then the best avenue is to re-engineer it. In this regard Erik is 100% correct.

I can tell you that there is an added benefit if you have to recreate your own stuff due to loss of IP (whatever the reason) and that is that the second pass at the development is usually a superior design!!

- Michael Karas