grinding down chips was Re: QX10 graphics board

[Robert Krten]

William Donzelli sez...
> 
> > I don't know about grinding, but the guy at MIT who figured out the Xbox
> > innards did something of the sort (regardless, it's a great read):
> 
> A guy I went to school with does this for Motorola. He gets chips back
> that are failing in the field and dissects them to find out what went
> wrong.
> 
> I think the actual process involves shaving rather than grinding.

I did something similar as a kid at BNR (now Nortel) at their Corkstown facility.
I had purchased a whack of "unmarked but guaranteed to be the same chip"
from the old MIL (Microsystems International Limited) at a surplus place,
and mentioned to one of the engineers at BNR that I'd like to know what they were.

The process was that they put it into a high temperature high-oxygen-content
chamber and basically "eroded" the plastic from around the chip.  Over the
course of a few hours, the eroded plastic was simply brushed away,
finally exposing the chip.  We were then able to read the part number off
the die -- ML741 :-)

Cheers,
-RK

--
Robert Krten, PARSE Software Devices +1 613 599 8316.
Realtime Systems Architecture, Consulting, Books and Training at www.parse.com
Looking for Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-1 through PDP-15 minicomputers!