A Register Transfer Level (RTL) representation is recovered from a netlist representing an integrated circuit (IC). The netlist is converted to a graph comprising nodes belonging to a set of node types and edges connecting the nodes. The set of node types includes an instance node type representing an electronic component and a wire node type representing signal transfer between components. The graph is converted to a standardized graph by replacing subgraphs of the graph with standardized subgraphs. An RTL representation of the standardized graph is generated by operations including building signal declarations in a hardware description language (HDL) from the wire nodes of the standardized graph and building signal assignments in the HDL from instance nodes of the standardized graph.