I recently had the pleasure of receiving some exposed ICs from a giveway on Nick Chernyy’s blog — he decaps them using sulfuric acid and takes fantastic closeups under a microscope.
Although I don’t have a microscope handy, I do have a variety of camera lenses to work with. This is a random Motorola processor, taken at 1:1 using Nikon’s 105mm macro:
I’ve always been partial to the urban microcosm that integrated circuits appear to be… I have fond memories of my grandfather bringing me a full wafer of chips from Rockwell (which I, being a child, promptly snapped in half). This guy is the size of my fingernail and is affixed to a slide, so it should be safe even in my hands…
6 Comments
Very Cool.
Thanks!
Hi Matt,
This picture looks great! I did not think it could be possible using only a macro lens. You can improve the image a little bit by scrubbing the die. I am sure that there is a little bit of microscope oil remaining which may cause some of the strange lighting artifacts. I usually clean the dies with Windex and then dry them with compressed air, but most other household glass cleaners will do.
Thanks, Nick! I was able to get a little bit closer using stacked lenses, too… but even in the shot above, I’m running up against the maximum resolution of my camera as well as the physics of diffraction.
It reminds me of a floating city!
Indeed!
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