How I reverse engineer a chip 

I worked for TI back in 1972-74 and was part of the design team that designed many of the LS series of parts, including this one.

"Although it might not look like it, some steps can take days" he says. Well, it does look like most steps can take days. Amazing work.

This seems like some sort of lost art.

This is your daily dose of Recommendation Reverse engineering chips

Thank you for doing this for the EE community and future generations.

It took several hours in college for us to learn this art, but you explained it in just 5 minutes. Great video.

Holy smokes. I've used computers for a long time. But not as much on the circuit board and chip level. Seeing your photo results and describing the lay out of the chip was really eye opening for me. Also I've never seen the different layers like that before. Very cool. Thank you.

1986: we will gonna have flying cars in the 2020s 2020s: we will try to reverse EVERY 80s chip

Your work is amazing and immensely appreciated by those of us who like to know, but can not afford to.

Thank you so much for contributing so much to the community ! People like you make this world possible

That's so beautiful work, you can explain some of the basics of electronics engineering.

What a beautiful work station. I wish I had something of the same caliber. Great video Robert!

Wow didn't know about ICE program. I am a photographer and make panoramas, I think this will be my new tool of choice.

i love that people like you do these things and make videos like this!

It took so long for youtube to recommend channel like this. I lovw your diy things.

I feel like there's a huge gap between "here's a high quality image of each layer" and "here's the chip reverse engineered".

This is the first video I've come across that you've made. Now I'm going to check out the decapping video and more!

This is the coolest thing I've ever seen. I could watch the stitch image layering all day for relaxation

Me: learning chip design ...and RU-vid recommends this video

Thank you for being so thorough. This is awesome.

Thanks for showing us your very serviceable setup. 🙂👍Used to do this sort of thing professionally, almost half a century ago. It's slow, patient, fascinating and satisfying work. We also used near-UV light at high magnification (1200x and higher) to find surface features down to about a micron in width. A micron wide feature appears as a fuzzy line in that light, but you can make good use of interference patterns to figure out exactly what is going on. You can also etch through the layers of Silicon, to learn about Gate sizes, Oxide depths, doping depths, etc. It's possible to discern depths and thicknesses down to within a few hundred Angstroms, using similar optical methods and very careful etching; controlling etchant temperature, concentrations, mixtures and temperatures.

Hi Robert, to answer your question : Yes I enjoyed very much your video. I fell on it on youtube, and it's exactly what I would have dreamt of, without even trying to ask : You are here describing in high details, th work cycle of professional hardware engineering. Maybe I'll have an opportunity to explain you why, I was digging everywhere to find that. Many thanks for your excellent work : I know how much work it is to make videos that feel so easy and informative at the same time Jean-Baptiste

This is amazing! I never realized this was even possible...

The movie Paycheck comes to mind looking at your work.

This is such great work and a lot of help for others who might need it for reference.

Que bueno que encontre tu canal, tenes publicadas muchas cosas interesantes! Saludos desde argentina!

I am really grateful to your work , thanks robert sir

Impressive... he's the type of person that keeps humanity moving forward.

Wow ! Very interesting and well made ! Thanks a lot for sharing !

Very clever! That looks like a heck load of work mate

I’d love to see this chip built out onto a pcb. That would be cool.

This is quite informative. This would be amazing if you could do this for the Gameboy MBC(memory bank controllers) and the Gameboy Advance custom Arm7tdmi.

I remember the big softcover books that TI made to describe their chips, the LS172 was a popular one.

As someone in their second year of EET at college, this blows my mind.

This is amazing ... You are today's real IT scientist ...

Thank you. You are a very patient person.

You are on another level. This is GOLD.

that's insane, blows my mind away. How much affort someone has to required in order to do that?!?!? thanks man.

Never seen any content like this...I really appreciate this awesome work...(new sub to ur channel, hope I get awesome deconstructions & many more)😊

I don't understand it, but I admire the technical prowess.

Oh man, how much I need the SC01-A chip from Votrax reversed engineered. ........ That would really save a lot of pinball enthusiasts. .......

That's not a lot of work... that's a lot of QUALITY work!! Woow man, great article and video, thanks for sharing!

It looks like you have a trinocular microscope or at least a switchable camera port. Having had an AmScope with the latter configuration I ended up 3D-printing a clamp to which a wooden board was screwed. The board, having a notch and a covering of foam tape allowed one to just place the phone onto it, looking at a regular eyepiece popped into the camera port. It's a worthwhile build that maintains the convenience and connectivity of a smartphone.

I had no idea this was even possible! My mind is blown! MAN, I wish I could study with you!

Mr. Baruch very informative video, thanks from an Indian.

thank you for your open knowledge contributions

This guy is master of this art.

Fantastic work that is done, like it, makes technology more futher possible

It would be epic if you reverse engineered the Amiga custom chipset. But that would take a very long time and cost a bit. Especially now the chips are getting rarer.

Ever think about powering the dies up? Things like optoisolators would be interesting. I use a stack shot macro stage which makes things easy.

I've recently started to enjoy RU-vid recommendations, because at times it actuall gets it right! Like this video/channel. Some weird geek talking about how he reverse engineers chips: wow! Instant subscription!

Excellent job doing this work.

Wow! Really great for future EE’s to learn! Thank you for your work

Damn that's a lot of work.

Wow, that is respectable work. Good job.

RU-vidr: any suggestions? Comments: nice vedio.

I miss the late 80s early 90s. Best music ever.ps this guy could be extremely Dangerous If he wanted to. I hope people understand the level of smartness that he is demonstrating

Your work is impressive..thanks for sharing it.

Who on earth would dislike this? Nice one my friend! Have an awesome day!

Beautiful work.

hey! nice raise 3d printer mate. In the last months me and a co worker were able to convince the company we work for to buy one. We got the pro plus and it is amazing.

What a fantastic channel, keep it up.

Great job you've done there....This is something new I learnt today......Keep it up

Very interesting! I don’t know a lot about electronics… I’ve only been learning for a few years. But I go to a local electronics recycling place almost every day for a few hours. A buddy of mine runs the yard and I get some pretty neat things. If you’ll tell me where to look… I’ll keep an eye out for certain industrial Devices and old things that might have chips you want in them. I collect chips and parts. Iv desoldered over tens of thousands of parts in the last three years. I know that sounds ridiculous and exaggerated but it’s not. I developed a method of using low pressure through an air compressor and a handheld modified airbrush, along with a soldiering in the other hand… And I can desolder a 16 pin dip chip in a matter of a few seconds. I started doing it to learn and collect parts that I could use in projects... and after a few months kept going because it’s like a treasure hunt… and although it isn’t worth my time to salvage and save parts for the sole purpose of reusing them… I still enjoy it because of the treasure hunt. . Sure it’s great to have them in stock, But it’s almost a full-time job salvaging that many parts in keeping them organized. And there is no time left over building projects… And not mention these are used parts were talking about. So after removing testing and cataloging hundreds of parts per day five days a week for a year and a half… Now I only go for the big IGBT’s, and other expensive or beautiful components. I love Collecting parts that are visually appealing, or interesting some other way. Especially when Government corporations or large industrial companies bring high-grade weird and interesting things to the scrap yard. So I focus on that and pretty much avoid consumer-electronics unless they’re super old! I love old White and purple ceramic chips… they are my favorite! And of course I could get most of them on eBay for pennies or a few dollars… But it’s more fun if I only add parts to my collection that I find myself! I have over 150 pounds of transistors. Spread over half a dozen parts storage drawer banks. If I take out the weight of the drawer banks there’s at least 150 pounds of semiconductors. And my favorites are framed in a flat case… Stuck in foam. I love finding really old chips, fancy TO-3 package transistors that were hand-painted Or have colorful silkscreen Graphics, and all kinds of other weird things like early examples of LEDs. I know very little about the electronic theory, however I have put together a humble TestBench with test gear that I mostly repaired myself. I can do the basic stuff like look for burned areas, replace filter caps, maybe do a bit of in circuit testing. That’s as far as I go. I just can’t wrap my head around the rest yet. However I’m hoping one day I can understand it well enough to do some more interesting things with the old parts I salvage. Would be awesome to sit down and get the old parts out, characterize all of these cool transistors and chips with my curve tracers and other test gear. I just think it would be a lot of fun Sorry to ramble on… But if you can give me an idea where to look or what kind of parts you’re interested in… I’ll be glad to help. I Maybe even have some old transistors and weird things that you might disassemble or cut cross sections out of. That’s another thing I will eventually try. I already have gemstone cutting equipment and lapidary gear so it would be cool to do cut cross sections of all types of components… And photograph them under my microscope. Anyway let me know if I can help.!m,

wonderful work

Wow what a video. First time I seen inside a chip

This is for low to medium scale integration. Modern CPU's have feature widths less than the wavelength of visible light and can't be optically resolved. These lines turn into iridescent colors much like the coloring of many butterflies. A modern CPU chip contains many more layers covering the lower layers so individual transistor elements can not be seen. The ability to see individual lines started to end with chips getting features smaller than 1 micron.

Lot of simple but clever ideas! :)

thank you robert i can´t get it but it is so nice to see such meticulous work impresive very impresive i wonder if there are videos showing the normal process i mean how they make them but i think this is much more difficult in a way specially made in this artisan way incredible thanks again for showing us so well

I think I just watched the nerdiest unboxing video. Still enjoyed it. Thanks

so cool - great vid robert!

congratulations, you have achieved the nerdiest hobby to ever exist

This was very nice, thank you for sharing this with us.

Sir this was amazing. Thank you very much for your amazing work

That line of work would drive me f#cking mad..

This is simply great work. Thumbs up for you.

Great video and happy to see such work station

Wow. I didn't expect this video to hold my interest. I loved it. I just subscribed.

Excellent engineering!

Im a student, so all i can give you is like..

Respect!

Awesome video, thanks! Regarding the stitching of photos, there's also a nice open-source/multiplatform program called "Hugin". I used it when stitching scans of old schematics and it worked great.

I don't understand anything about this but this looks interesting. Great vid!

2:48 now that's new, i never knew there is a program like that on microsoft.... hahahaha

Excellent work

Oh, man... It's a lot of work. Congrats!

Im not into this kind of stuff but yet u deserved a subscribe, amazing stuff

Huh! Interesting. I did this in 1996-1999 at a company for (then) state-of-the-art chips. Image acquisition was only 20% of the effort; I also wrote a tool for assisting with the reverse engineering. Modern chips have features too small to be seen optically. Pretty much have to use electron microscopy now. But doing this in a home setup is very impressive. Well done!

This is very cool! Nice job!

New to your RU-vid and love to see more, I'll support you just keep it up!

Very interesting! Thank you for sharing the process :)

Thank you for your work!!

Awesome work! Appreciate your work.

Excellent job you make here!

i think this is nutz. you have a skill that is special and I completely support you. -- thank you

That is really fantastic and I am fascinated, thank you for making this video.

Fantastic job

the Commodore SID chip needs to live again

Outstanding work !!!

Excellent work and processes