Why would you de-cap a chip?
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Someone mentioned invar as a material with low thermal expansion. Another material used in semiconductor industries is Zerodur, thermal expansion close to zero. Quite cool stuff. [..]
At least until they charge a reasonable price, eg $100 for lifetime use of per version of the software, or if it needs frequent updating, then $30 a month or something?
Pirating is out of the question. At a certain point you need to hand off the design to a factory so it can be produced... the moment they read your data you would get caught. You can bet your money that stuff calls 'home'...
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Someone mentioned invar as a material with low thermal expansion. Another material used in semiconductor industries is Zerodur, thermal expansion close to zero. Quite cool stuff. [..]
Yes, but it can also be a lukewarm or hot stuff and it still doesn't care! How cool is that!
Great stuff, thanks Dave and Vincent! It's always amazing to see how the magic happens.
Also those nanometer probes, I guess, you cannot even breathe on it, or it will bend
I had a question tho, is there any widely available solvent or chemical which can be used to remove/dissolve package epoxy of usual chip packages? I like taking photos of electronic gear, and tried couple ways to get die shots, but either shatter die or it gets badly damaged when trying remove epoxy mechanically. I have some dead modern CPUs and GPUs, which might be interesting to look at (lots actually, even some latest multi-billion transistor count chips)
Best one so far is nvidia geforce4 Ti4200 GPU die shot, which i got off it's BGA package by heating it and cracking open.
Pity it's covered with metal mask in front, so cannot see inner layers beauty.
If a company is going to charge over a million dollars a year for software, won't companies designing these IC's just pirate the software, or weigh the cost of purchasing a license to the software, to the cost of just allocating a few of their programmers to try and crack the software?
At least until they charge a reasonable price, eg $100 for lifetime use of per version of the software, or if it needs frequent updating, then $30 a month or something?
You do realize what kind of a colossal lawsuit would ensue after a thing like that?
If you have a market that has very few players, than practically no secret can be held for long.
is it really that hard to crack?
can someone upload a copy?
is it really that hard to crack?
can someone upload a copy?
Wafers are cut whit a mechanical saw? is that real?
image of a tester : http://www.teradyne.com/pressRoom/images/UltraFLEX-HD.tif (warning ; 43 megabyte file ! )
that testhead holds 1 chip under test ! if you ook inbetween the operator's arms you see the large plumbing fixtures that pipe liquid nitrogen into the head.. the chip is actually cycled , cold ( -30 degrees , ambient , 25 and hot (125) )
Wafers are cut whit a mechanical saw? is that real?
As free_electron said, mechanical sawing is one way of dicing. However, laser dicing offers thinner cuts and therefore less wasted wafer space. Where I work we mostly make very small microcontrollers (think tens of thousands of dies on a wafer), so hundreds of cuts are needed in both directions. Even with a very thin saw blade the losses with mechanical sawing would add up quickly.