$1 Calculator
I’ve been wanting to practice IC decapping and imaging. So I grabbed a $1 calculator, pulled it apart and stuck the die in acid. This resulted in the following die image, stuck using manually stitched frames (and the hacked together epi-illumination setup I’ve discussed before).
The die is somewhat similar to that shown and discussed here. Doesn’t seem like a lot has changed in the intervening 6 years:
Hopefully I can use this as a reference as I look at other dies and sort out my illumination system/microscope. The calculator used, was from a local 100Yen store:
It has a pretty typical construction, but gratifyingly use a real solar cell. Many recent “solar” calculators contain fake solar cells, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with those I’ve found here in Japan. The internal construction is a typical chip on board design:
A project I’ve been considering is grabbing a bunch of different $1 calculators and imaging the dies to see how many distinct designs there are out there. I’ll probably revisit this when I have clean, flat illumination on the automated microscope.
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