Intel Celeron 500MHz Mendocino SL3LQ [JPG]

This chip has been a long time coming. When I originally tried opening it and scraping away at it like a traditional Intel chip I was greeted with this: flic.kr/p/2kx95ss

From past experience I know that when you see that kind of structure it is game over and it cannot be removed via the razor method without destroying the chip.

 

So, I bought an ultrasonic cleaner, ferric chloride and glass etching paste and after experimenting of some sacrificial chips I dunked this one into the ferric chloride. After several rounds a lot of material had been removed but there were some metal layers which were not budging.

 

After discussing with Martijn Boer, it seemed like I should be able to use the glass etching paste to attack the silicon layer underneath this metal layer. I placed the chip into a beaker with some water and dissolved some paste in it and let it run for about an hour in the ultra sonic cleaner. This is the result, I may have gone a bit too long on this since unlike ferric chloride, glass etching paste attacks the silicon, which happens to be what the layer we are interested in is made of >:(. As you can see it started to eat too deep into some spots on the chip.

 

This chip is HUGE, so I had to get funky with how I captured it. Similar to the memory controller I posted previously, I switched my camera's grid to 6x4 which means I pan a greater distance in the x axis every time I switch to a new column. Still had lots of warping which was corrected in Photoshop using a tool called "perspective crop" which worked wonders.

 

Die Size: (W) 14.79mm x (L) 10.35mm

Camera: SONY A6000

Number of Images: 240

Panorama Y Axis: 16 Images

Panorama X Axis: 15 Images

ISO: 100

Shutter Speed: 1.3"

Light Source: Led on side of objective

DIC: No

Overlap: ? (Not sure, I changed grid to 6x4)

Microscope Objective: 5X

Microscope Eyepiece: DSLR Mount

Grid Used: 6x4 (Panning Movement Aid)

Capture Motion: ZigZag

Stitching Software: Microsoft ICE

Other Software: Photoshop for de-skewing, GIMP for scaling

Image Type: JPG, (had to reduce resolution to 30K on the largest axis because flickr kept crashing on upload. Original was roughly 44.7K)

Done