Decapping ICs (removing epoxy packaging from chips to expose the dies)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ส.ค. 2012
- I thought it would be interesting to try decapping some chips. This involves using fuming nitric acid, which also seemed fun, so I thought I would give it a go. The process starts by milling a precise pocket into the IC using my CNC machine. I used carbide tooling to cut the glass fiber/epoxy material. I then put a drop or two of the acid into the pocket, and raised the temperature to about 100*C. The acid dissolves the epoxy packaging as it sort of "dries". I added more acid to the pocket every few minutes. After about 10 minutes, I washed the IC in acetone, then reapplied acid if there was still material left on the die. Eventually, it was all cleared away, and I had a nice decapped IC.
- วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Ben, Love your videos and this one is very interesting but PLEASE PLEASE be aware that fuming nitric acid should always be handled either outside or in a fume hood. White fuming nitric (essentially 100% HNO3) and ESPECIALLY red fuming (HNO3 with excess dissolved NO2/N2O4) both give off nitric oxide/dinitrogen tetroxide which is INSIDIOUSLY DANGEROUS. It causes pulmonary edema and death in tiny amounts. An inhaled lethal dose does not manifest itself until days later and then it is often too late. Please be careful and maybe add this warning to your video.
Wow - this is important to know! Guys - please vote parent comment up so that it is more visible because everyone watching this video should know this.
Sadly we have to report that Ben has....
Ha! REAL MEN breath in nitric oxides and don't even blink!!!
I stilkkjlsgk ohh help....... hksbdfsdfajksaf;nsadfksfdkjsdf
accidentalvoyeur m
Sounds like bullshit. How many real people have died 3 days after playing with fuming nitric acid?
I used to repair equipment for a company that did this, reverse engineer chips for copy write suites....they would do as you did then micrograph the chip and print it out on paper about 50 feet by 50 feet from taped together plots from a 4 foot wide plotter prints spread out on the floor, then a team of people would get on there hands and knees with colored markers and trace out the circuits of interest...
what year was this
Nic Skram may be 2015)
Copyright* Suits* their*
Craig Diamond I Developed a New Intergrated Circuit Subtrate Design Based on " INFUSED "Wide Band Gap " TUNNELING " Utilizing Nanotechnology Doping , How Would I Approach A Technology Company For A Licensing agreement?
Craig Diamond That sound super interesting!
I gotta say... this is a cool thing to do. It was really neat seeing the microscopic view of the chip circuits. good channel.
Blows my mind the precision of the IC traces
Wow! That was interesting. I never dreamed those IC's looked like that inside. I actually thought the circuit was a lot larger. Thanks for posting that.
I usd to look inside early E-PROM chips with a microscope, and we measured the size of the transistors, them counted them! One 64k chip had 65,000 transistors.
You could increase the magnification of the microscope and look for hidden markings or the so called designer grafitti, which where used to trace the chips in case of industrial espionage, altough many times the designers put this markings there for fun...
Yes, like the famous “Bill Suxx” logo done by intel cpu designers
@@MaverickM1 too bad that was just a hoax and didn't really happen
One thing you could do id take infrared heat photos of the chip die during operation. That would especially be cool on larger chips such as SoC's or CPU's.
That would be pretty cool, nice idea
I know this is a really old video, but I enjoyed watching the decapping process you are using. It reminded me of a project I played around with in the late 80's. The project used a decapped dynamic ram chip as an image sensor. The very large dip memories of the era had metal lids so they were very easily decapped with a torch or soldering iron. The dynamic ram packages are designed to be totally light proof since the capacitor based memory's charge bleeds off quicker in the light. This effect was used to make a crude image sensor in this project.
This was extremely interesting and informative! Thank you for taking the time to share your experiment with us. Cheers from Australia, Rolf
Very informative and interesting for those who, Like me, are used to do reverse ingeneering. For those who are asking. You don't need to decap microprocessors since the 80286 because they are not encapsulated in epoxy. It is very easy to open them with a sharp cheasel. The same goes to all ics in metal or ceramic case.
but is it possible do with the chip in circuit and without damaging the silicon or rip off the wires conections ? . so that the circuit can still work flawlessly. do heating it make it easier to cut ? do u heat them ? how much ? or heating the blade edge ?
I have been trying to pop these things apart for months! Ive never found any useful videos but this finally answered my questions! Thanks!
P.S. I've noticed that a lot of older CPU's (early 90's) simply have a metal cap soldered over small panel in which the chip is mounted; apply a bit of heat and you can pop them off, and since older chip architecture is comparatively large, it's very easy and interesting to see with the naked eye!
I always wondered how is it inside an IC! Thanks for the experiment.
Thank you very much for the upload. Always wanted to take a look in IC.
I love your videos! You have a great way about you that helps people like me try to understand very complicated subjects. I've been recently playing around with Optocouplers/optoisolators and would love to see the LED inside actually do its work. Thanks for the vids, keep it up!
How about decapping the proprietary blob chips / chips in electronic toys? This is pretty cool!
Bump
Aceatone?
Aceatone?
No, acetone is far too weak.
Ben, just a small tip from somebody who has done this professionally. After dripping, just rinse the whole IC in the acid then rinse in acetone, after that reheat and repeat the process. This will get a more even decap. We also used a flat mill bit for the initial hole. But be aware, fuming nitric acid is serious stuff.
Nicely edited!!
Hey you!! 😘😁
👍
Those bond wires are pure gold, so there is a good reason to do this.
CNCing a pocket in the die to get the ball rolling looks like a great idea! It reduces the time it takes, the amount of acid you need and the amount of toxic fumes released.
Not to mention how frigging cool it is to get a photograph of a die inside the packaging, and possibly still have the chip in working order!
It would be very interesting to decapp a ATTINY/MEGA and let it do an complex calculation, and then view it under the electron-microscope.
But I don't think you could observe anything, it would just look static as it did the calculation. Maybe decap, add liquid nitrogen and *O V E R C L O C K*
Very cool man! Just last week I was wondering how do decap ICs, and this week youtube recommended this video to me.
In the 80's I used to use a screwdriver and a hammer to split them on their seams the long way and had the same results. Perfect separation
As always, a very informative and well presented video on a subject that I've always wanted to foray into. Thanks!
Clear and concise, short and sweet, thanks this was great!
Great experiment. Thanks for showing.
RODALCO2007 I see you everywhere.
RODALCO2007 especially on photons vids.
Nice! You can make an ultra fine needle by dipping (at short intervals) a small steel wire in NaOH and running some electricity through it, don't remember the polarity though. This way we get tiny preparation needles for microscopy.
thanks for the tip(pun intended)! last week I was searching online how to exactly do this but unable to find. I just had in mind that I've read it somewhere online and couldn't find any traces when needed.
You got some nice handy tools to work with! Intesting video :)
Cool! Yeah, have no idea what to do, but it's amazing to see that clean chip and wires!
That chip looked gorgeous, nice work.
Very cool to see how it looks inside a microchip. It's more than 30 years since I first wondered how it looks inside 😃
It was a lot smaller than I thought. Now I wonder how they manage to make it so small 😂
Thank you for making this video !!
It's all done with photographic equipment and acid. The patterns projected onto the Silicon slice were originally hand drawn in a much larger sized, then photographically scaled down. Modern factories use special machines from the Netherlands to scale shapes way down so a thin line on the drawing becomes just a few atoms wide. Also they now use computers to do the original drawings for new chips. But the old 74xx and 40xx logic chips had much fewer lines and the inventors could still use hand drawn designs.
Very cool. Very very cool. The decapped logic ic's looked like dead bugs.
That's really cool. I've always wanted to see inside one of those chips.
Super cool. Always wondered what these look like inside
De-cap an Atmega :0 and then couple it to a liquid nitrogen cooled heatsink and play with clock speeds......................
Do Atmegas have external clock inputs?
They do.
I think almost all Atmel AVR chips have a clock input. Even the 6 pin devices have a clock input.
Use an Attinny85 it's cheaper and have less pins.
See how the IC reacts to various frequencies and intensities of light. Also try a strobe light to mess with the logic gates.
Would really love to see that!
If I search for "fuming nitric acid" on ebay here where I live, black helicopters will be hovering outside my window in 5 minutes
Well, make sure and put it on TH-cam if you do!
Do it!
This post has been recorded by the secret service already, so no worries ;-)
fft2020 have you tried using a secure VPN from a non static mobile IP address. Make sure none of that stuff is traceable back to you and your golden! Oh shit! I just heard muffled rotor sounds and seen a laser dot on the wall! 😂😂😂
@@MrDegsy69 On the wall is OK. On your chest, sorry!
I don't have a damm idea what this guy is talking about most of the time, But man; his work keeps me fixated ! 🤪
This is just awsome!
"I was just interested in playing with nitric acid" Love this line!
Love the sight of the ic
Back in... 1986??? ish. I visited the SEC research labs in Richmond Melbourne). One of the instruments they shwed off was an SEM. They had a de-capped chip from a digital watch, powered, and as the circuit switched you could see it in the SEM because the energised paths in the silicone bled a few electrons...
totally astonishing to watch silicon circuits in real time using electron imaging.
SEM's should be much more accessible these days... It'd be utterly awesome to see one of these circuits lit up in an SEM.
Well that was damn interesting... I've always wondered how enthusiasts reverse engineer custom chips for game consoles... Thanks....
i've always wanted someone to do this! so cool
nice video for aspiring failure analysts to see how to get into a die. manual decapping is so much better than the jet-etch instrument. a good way to get someone's foot in the door into the IC failure analysis industry - work your way up to an FIB or AFM.
If you de-cap some DRAM you can focus an image on the die, write all 1's to every memory location and then read the memory back. The brighter the light, the faster the memory location will discharge and you should be able to decide the image. This is how CCD camera sensors work.
That is putting it rather simply, and only focuses on the "capacitive" nature which some designs use. The actual structure of each bit in terms of doping is quite different, and CCDs are better described as photodiodes in varying bias modes (design determined) attached to bit-bucket shift registers, rather than addressable, selectively rechargeable capacitors. The corresponding decay in DRAMs is what corresponds to the dark current and some other factors in the CCD, which when combined with the fact that you want the impinging light to actually transition the cells and that cells for CCDs are read and reset at rates no faster than what the cells for DRAMs are scanned in a read and rewrite process. There are also other factors which cause differences between the two but...
Interesting stuff does not have to have a goal, it's all about the lesson. Thanks and cheers to you.
Thank you my first look at an ic internals
When I worked at Maxwell Technologies in the early 2000's, we tested off the shelf IC's for space use.
They would remove the epoxy on the chips to be tested to expose the bare die.
They would then be 'Zapped' with particles that came out of a cyclotron at we rented time on at places like Texas A&M.
While this was happening, test equipment would analyse them for Latch-ups, and flipped bits if they where memory chips.
Thanks a lot for this video sir ! Very enlightening !
"mostly interested in playing with nitric acid" I appreciate you honesty.
Very useful information .Thanks
This is proper decapping. We should send these instructions to Linus or JZTwoCents to further improve their decapping methods for CPUs :P
When I was a kid I just put them in a vise at an angle, and crushed the top open. Mostly worked. They were from a Radio Shack grab bag, and I never did know what they were supposed to do. That was 1970s technology.
Share this with HUGHES aircraft. I almost took a job, in the late 1970s, that required milling chips to detect electrical faults. Your way seems better because of powering up the device. Great work!
really interesting. I'm trying to troubleshoot some old SNES turbo controllers. One of them had one of those "blob" ICs on it. Now, I really want to get in there!
A really nice idea. oldschool EPROM chips with clear silica windows have already been used. Needless to say that exposure times are quite long.
I worked at GTE Sylvania in the late 1970s designing vertical deflection circuits for color TVs. I watched as several 8 watt audio ICs were decapped to identify the failure mode and location. A powered hood was used to protect against fumes. It is possible to identify the difference between over voltage versus over current faults. Picture tube arcing could produce over voltage, and poor heatsinking could produce over current faults.
Good job, dude! Amazing!
this is the coolest shit I think I've ever seen in my life. I've always wanted to know how a chip works and what's inside.
Awesome job Ben! I was on the fence before, but after this video I had to sub!
really interesting video :D
Liked that!
Excellent brother. Nice Explanation
Put the chip in a ceramic chip socket then use trichlorethelate (however you spell that) as Japanese audiophiles do with DAC chips so they can solder silver wires on
Wow this was really cool!
That's what I've been looking for!
This video is win, thanks for making this. Awesome.
Awesome!!! Never thought of this!
I’ve seen this done in an R&D lab once and they dissolved the chip encapsulation and the glass layer over the chip with hydrofluoric acid which is seriously nasty stuff. The chip was then run under an electron microscope and you could see the gates operate as light transitions. Very cool.
I saw a de-capped chip being investigated in the old BT research labs. I seem to remember them using polarized light where they could see the pd of various tracks changing. They did not use probes as such. Very interesting though about 28 years ago.
Decapping a Core i7.
+Isaías J. putting it in close to 0k surrounding(liquid nitrogen?) and overclock it to the max
mathias de potter Yes.
+mathias de potter It may not work due to the cold bug unfortunately :/
Ciro Santilli
we're not trying to reverse engineer it though..
Romanator X
it is possible, you don't put the cpu in before starting, you wait till the computer starts.. before plopping it in...
Very informative. Thanks!
I loved the IC under the microscope so much, that I set it as my desktop background.
Damn you and your interesting videos!
Now I want to play around with nitric acid. ..
If you want to see some depackaged chips I have some I've done for work. The comment about modern chips being in metal packages is backwards. Older chips were sometimes capped in metal and a very few still are for heat dissipation but most are just epoxy encapsulated. You really need a fume hood or outdoor location for the acid work though.
Did you try (micro) probing the chips. I was wondering if the oxide layer prevents connection to a probe and if I could measure the voltage/signal at specific locations.
I have always liked the IC's that are light erasable. there is a sticker over the little round window. removing the sticker and letting light fall on the die erases the contents. but it was interesting to see the lexicon inside, even if what ever was on them was gone.
hey.. great Video... I liked you process...
That is really cool!
Do you know if fuming sulphuric acid (oleum) works as well? At least it wouldn't be as toxic substance and it might have better availability since nitric acid is highly oxidising so it can be used to make explosives. One friend of mine photographs those chips and would be very interested to get certain ICs decapped.
It's incredible!!!
I used a hammer and wood chisel and one light tap in between the two slabs (eg where the ic pins disappear) and presto with 1/1000th the hassle. I put the dies under the microscope and found micro print, etc. Digital photography was born when someone else tried this with a powered up functioning dynamic ram chip.
This is cool. I had no idea how small the chip was under there.
great work
Back in the late 80's, Micron Semiconductor (memory manufacturer) used a water drill to expose the top of their RAM chips for failure analysis. One of my side projects was using a decapped RAM chip for a vision system. Didn't have much luck with it.
What should you do with them? Please pretty please show us high def footage of them! They look so cool.
awesome video
WOW, I've wanted to know how to do this for nearly forty years! I always thought that chip packages were made out of some sort of porcelain (in that case, I guess then one could crack open these packages with a hammer). Apparently, I was wrong about the materials. Very cool that this is possible, though the demo makes clear that this is a project beyond my patience level.
High temperature chips are ceramic.
PDIP chips are plastic and CDIP are ceramic. Most 7400 series chips (or other simple, low temp chips) now are PDIP because it costs less.
everything changes, stay open-minded
I had great success using a pair of side cutters, and popping the top off. That was in the late 70's and early 80's.
We decapped IC's to do FA (failure analysis). I always wondered how that was done. Thanks. PS, Nice work on the decap.
You did it, but didn't know how to do it?
WAT?
:-/
Wow it amazing thanks for sharring.
This is apparently how the guy in the UK used to break the encryption of the old analog SKY satellite service... he would use these methods to expose the die on the smart cards and probe them while operating. I think it's great when something thought impossible or crazy idea is carried out and works! :)
Interesting, thanks for the videos!
Nice video man.
This is how we would hack ASICs, laying needles on the data buses and logging the interaction of the sub structures. With enough patients the IC's would usually cough up there secrets :) As Systemrat2008 mentioned you can use HF to remove the uppermesh layers on the die. These final delayering steps can be very difficult and many of the more advanced ICs has many layers to prevent this.
omfg beautiful job man, inspirating...
OMG so incredible!!!!
great video
Oooh thats very pretty!
Wow! You've re-invented it for us :) I've thought that the chip is hollow inside and you can open it from edges if you really want it... But now I see... Cool look BTW. It would be great to know about it's components in details there... a little "pick a point" video.
Woah, that's amazing.
can you use this to get a coolant to the important parts of an ic (microprocessor specifically) and massively overclock them more so than without decapping them?
each wire you see is gold