Decapping Integrated Circuits

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parkview
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Decapping Integrated Circuits

Post by parkview » Sat Mar 14, 2020 8:27 am

Last week Hack-a-Day posted an blog page on how you can decap an IC via using heat to decompose the glue that holds the top and bottom of the IC together: https://hackaday.com/2020/03/11/chip-de ... -easy-way/

The next day I setup my trusty Chinese hot air soldering station out in the shed and got to work in pulling apart a DVD-Drive and an old Cisco desk phone that I had lying around. Sure enough I found lots of chips that I could remove from the boards:
dvd-drive.jpg
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I turned the air-flow up and set the temperature to 550deg C and set to work heating up the chips and once they where hot enough, trying to peel the surfaces apart:
decap-work1.jpg
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Some of them separated easily, in others the glue was very strong. There where two chips (Winbond?), that had extremely thin silicon and they fractured very easily. In the end I ended up with three nice looking silicon chips, the best was this Broadcom IC:
Broadcom_sml.jpg
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I pulled apart a voltage regulator, and found I nice looking core inside:
regulator.jpg
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Above, you can see the three wire bond pads on the left half of the chip.

Not bad for an hours worth of fun!

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