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A comment on Reverse-engineering a vintage power supply chip from die photos. Parent comment

Re:Reverse-engineering a vintage power supply chip from die ... by kens on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @02:21PM (#28225150)
The Visual 6502 project is what originally inspired me to look inside integrated circuits and see how they really work. Although ICs seem like mysterious black boxes, you can see what's going on. At least until about 1980, and then it gets too complicated for me :-)

http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/

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Re:Reverse-engineering a vintage power supply chip from die ... by wuschel on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @06:38PM (#28228037)
What are the challenges in reverse engineering more modern chips?

PS awesome blog!

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Re:Reverse-engineering a vintage power supply chip from die ... by kens on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @07:05PM (#28228272)
The main problem is Moore's Law, so everything gets smaller and smaller. The old chips I look at have a single metal layer, which makes it much easier to see what's going on. And then in the 1990s, feature sizes got smaller than the wavelength of light so my optical microscope can't see the features.
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