Collaborate Disseminate
We’ve taken ICs apart before, but if they are in an epoxy package, it requires some lab gear and a lot of safety. Typically, you’ll heat the part and use …read more Continue reading No Acid: Open ICs with a Tesla Coil
As we approach the moment in the year at which websites enter a festive silly season of scrambling to find any story with a festive angle, we’re pleased to see …read more Continue reading A Particularly Festive Chip Decapping
For better or worse, this synthesizer was king in the 1980s music scene. Sure, there had been synthesizers before, but none acheived the sudden popularity of Yamaha’s DX7. “Take on …read more Continue reading Ken Shirriff Breaks Open the Yamaha DX7
It’s no secret that the work of [Ken Sherriff] graces the front pages of Hackaday quite frequently. He’s back again, this time reverse engineering a comparator chip from a photo …read more Continue reading [Ken Sherriff] Picks Apart Mystery Chip from Twitter Photo
We are always glad to see [Ken Shirriff] tear into something new and this month he’s looking inside a quartz oscillator module. Offhand, you’d think there’s not much to these. A slab of quartz and some sort of inverter, right? …read more
We always look forward to a new blog post by [Ken Shirriff] and this latest one didn’t cure us of that. His topic this time? Comparing two Game Boy audio chips. People have noticed before that the Game Boy Color sounds very different than a classic Game Boy, and he …read more
Continue reading Comparing Bare Silicon on Two Game Boy Audio Chips
There can be few of us who haven’t gazed with fascination upon the work of IC decappers, whether they are showing us classic devices from the early years of mass semiconductor manufacture, or reverse-engineering the latest and greatest. But so often their work appears to require some hardcore scientific equipment …read more