
How to open a microchip and see what’s inside - Cieplak
https://zeptobars.com/en/read/how-to-open-microchip-asic-what-inside
======
molticrystal
I always loved the easter eggs and art that some chips have included on the
circuits, most of which has never been seen and will never be seen by anybody
but the designers.

Here are some examples:

[http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/chipfun/graff.htm](http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/chipfun/graff.htm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_art)

My favorite has always been Wally/Waldo from Where's Wally.

~~~
akoster
Great links! Reminds of this [0] instance in the wild of using chip art to
send a message to those attempting to decap and reverse engineer a design.

[0] [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/42255/was-
there...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/42255/was-there-
cyrillic-text-visible-on-intel-386-chips-after-decapping)

~~~
escherplex
Which reminds me of a story from a retired Bell Labs, Murray Hill engineer who
related how they would add useless circuits to microprocessors to see if these
sections were duplicated or deleted by the old Soviet military engineers. They
were duplicated.

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new299
While sulfuric or nitric acid is the best way to do this, you can also decap
using a box cutter and some patience. I recently did this to figure out if an
opamp I bought was fake:

[http://41j.com/blog/2019/03/various-op177-die-
images/](http://41j.com/blog/2019/03/various-op177-die-images/)

I’ve posted some better images here:

[https://twitter.com/new299/status/1111301269988106245?s=21](https://twitter.com/new299/status/1111301269988106245?s=21)

I’m going to try and get setup to decap properly. But the for those more
concerned about using the required acids, a box cutter can give some insight
into what’s going on in many devices...

~~~
bacon_waffle
We occasionally used a regular old propane torch at a previous employer,
mainly looking for counterfeit power FETs. It'll burn the bond wires and such
off an IC, and certainly isn't going to result in great quality images but
it's not too hard to get rid of the plastic without damaging the silicon
beyond recognition.

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pkaye
I used to do this as part of R&D efforts at my employer 15 years back. It was
pretty dirt cheap to get someone to decap a package like this. You could also
get them to put under an electron(x-ray?) microscope and fly around the chip
like an airplane simulation. Then they would use something called FIB to cut
and draw wires to test out bug fixes. Usually the designers would keep a
couple unused gates at periodic intervals to borrow for fixes.

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adambowles
Applied Science YouTube channel did a video on this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT1FStxAVz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT1FStxAVz4)

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kevin2r
I always liked the physical side of electronics as contrary as computer
programming where is all virtual nowadays.

What would be the career path for a job in chip design and manufacturing?

~~~
baybal2
> What would be the career path for a job in chip design and manufacturing?

Very long and very lucky.

I looked into microelectronics when I was a teenager. In 2009, you needed to
be at the top of your class just to get an internship with a fab or a fabless.

In general, there are more automation with each year in both design and fab
side.

Companies have luxury of employing people with 20 year careers at prices of
average software devs in California.

~~~
baybal2
The only exception is, of course, China: their fabs offer 6 digit salaries for
senior engineers, but work experience is famously bad.

All of them expect foreign specialists to come with some "magic trick
solution" for their business refusing to work, and of course they get pissed
off if told that there are no magic tricks in this business.

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random878
I'm struck by how aesthetically pleasing some of the images are. They remind
me of stained glass windows.

~~~
pnutjam
colors are enhanced

~~~
Junk_Collector
No, that's pretty much what they look like under a microscope.

~~~
abrugsch
or in regular light... I recently decapped some old chips that were ceramic
packages with a soldered on metal cap. A 486 DX2[0] and an old Analog to
digital converter IC [1]. the bare silicon was beautiful once exposed..(Pics
posted without filters, though huawei's photos are generally more saturated
than I normally like)
[0][https://www.instagram.com/p/BudTdillc-K/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BudTdillc-K/)
[1][https://www.instagram.com/p/BudTG3Ml2ki/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BudTG3Ml2ki/)

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cogburnd02
There's some more here:

[https://siliconpr0n.org/wiki/doku.php?id=decap:start](https://siliconpr0n.org/wiki/doku.php?id=decap:start)

If we can digitize the entire netlist (schematic of transistors) from the 6502
processor by analyzing this type of photograph, why hasn't someone started
analyzing the crappy wifi chips that people who don't run Trisquel use--the
kind that require proprietary drivers to work correctly, in order to write
free drivers for them?

[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-
firmware.git/tree/)

~~~
detaro
A modern wifi chip is made with a lot smaller processes and multiple orders of
magnitude more complex.

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saagarjha
As an aside, I find chips that have been covered in epoxy really annoying. Not
only are they really difficult to remove, but even before that they don’t have
the typical markings on their casings that serve to identify them and tell you
whether they’re interesting to pursue…

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k__
When I was young, a friend of mine sawed a chip in two for this.

It was rather old and had small golden wires everywhere that connected stuff,
they made it look like some ancient tech.

~~~
abrugsch
You might like the pics I posted in the sibling comment
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19513860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19513860)

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parliament32
These are very cool.. The layout and traces remind me of a well designed
factory in Factorio.

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La-ang
I'm gonna print this and hang it on the wall :D Circuit Art I'd call it..

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flippyhead
These would make really cool art pieces on their own.

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edoo
Very interesting technique. I remember when they would reverse engineer chips
by grinding them down while taking nice pictures of each layer for the
engineers to interpret later.

~~~
westbywest
At a prior job last decade involving FCBGA packaging design for the company's
ASIC, and I witnessed exactly this to debug ESD problems, etc. That is,
prototype dice failing test would be ground down until a black spot was found.
Very expensive design cycles, so lots of incentive to extensively model such
issues before fab.

