May 9 2013

Decapsulated chips

Warning! Nitric Acid is nasty stuff to play around with. I did this so you don’t have to! Do not attempt to do this yourself or you may end up dead!
So today I wanted to try and decapsulate some chips to see how they were laid out inside.
lf1000_derp
This was my first attempt. A Leapfrog L1000 arm chip.
Not sure if I etched everything off or this is some sort of copper obfuscation layer.
lf1000_derp2
The other side looks like the standard back of a chip.
Next I attempted one of those custom glued down chips from a older leapfrog toy.
results were much better.
lfsomething
This is one really nice chip to look at :)
lfsomething3
lfsomething1
lfsomething8
lfsomething7
lfsomething4
lfsomething5
Some sort of die marking of who really made the chip. I couldn’t get a clear image of it.
This is at 500x zoom on my microscop
lfsomething6
Next up I did a old DEC scsi chip
dec
dec2
dec3
dec5
lastly a simple 8 pin eprom chip
i2ce
i2ce2
i2ce4