The Ware for December 2006 is posted below. Click on the image for a much larger version.
The photo of this ware was actually submitted by last month’s winner, echo. I thought this picture was particularly artistic, and for some reason it reminded me of Tron. It’s also a particularly nice ware, I like to use a device similar to this one when I can in certain projects.
Happy New Year to all, and I hope y’all had a safe and happy Christmas as well!
Without any qualifications whatsoever, I’d guess an old ascii character buffer. Ascii because there appear to be seven input and seven output pins with a few miscellaneous pins at the edge that could be control circuitry.
This is all guessing too. It appears to be a 14-pin DIP package. There is 1 pad each for power and ground at the bottom, with 2 wires each for more current capacity. That leaves 6 pins on the left and right. I would think it was in the 74xx series but that has power and ground at pin 7 and 14. There appear to be 6 replicated features but I don’t have the experience or time to figure out the gate structure.
I’ll just guess a 7404 hex inverter although I’m probably wrong.
My guess is some form of logic chip.
We have:
1. 20 pins
2. The top left pin seems to be doing something different to any of the others, therefore I’m assuming, based on it’s position, that it’s a power pin of some type.
3. Identical logic for the “middle” 7 pins on both sides of the chip. (I’m making the relatively safe assumption that the logic on both sides is identical.)
4. Chained logic – the logic for each pin seems to depend in some manner on the logic of the previous pin.
5. The bottom 5 pins (yes there is five, two on the left and three on the right) all seem to be doing something different.
6. The bottom, left, bottom-middle pin appears to be another power pin, most likely ground.
7. The two pins on the right and left at the bottom appear to be somehow related to the chaining of the logic.
8. There appears to be some form of bus structure between the two sides of the chip.
9. There appears to be no (direct) connections between the two sides of the chip.
I’m guessing, based on the positioning of the power pins (2, 6) that this is a dual, (8, 9) logic chip, containing some form of logic circuit with seven pins of one type, (3, 4, 5) and two of another. (7)
Sadly the picture is blurry enough that I cannot trace the circuits and come up with a difinitive answer.
My gut feeling is that this is a 74-xxx chip of some type, but it appears (don’t ask me why) to be many years old, possibly from when the white substrate with gold chip (cover) packaging was commonly used.
It also appears that it may have had a window in it’s chip, (or at least some form of large gap between the die and the package) given that this does not appear to have had the packaging ground off it, and the structures hodling the metal pins down.
Of course I have no knowledge which would allow me to give a difinitive answer, so I’ll leave that to everyone else.
Great ware bunnie, and … no google searching involved!
This is very interesting!
So far no one have said anything about the copper colour cubes along the side of the chip. they appear to be interconnected by a gold wire.
I can see at least 3 rolls and the left adn 2 on the right.
The die also appears to be fairly simple, 20pads in total.
Dark Ceramic package.
JimmyJo,
I assumed that the cubes were to hold the copper pins down.
I also assumed that they’d been glued to the pins in some form, and were also sprung down using some form of spring. (the wire)
However I did not comment on this as I have no idea what the inside of a computer chip looks like, and hence whether these were normal or unusual, as I have never dissected a computer chip.
Shiftregister with (non-monolithic) protection Diodes?
For a Nixie-Tube?
after a closer inspection, the seven units on both sides looks similar, so it seems that all 14 of them are doing something together.
In binary world, numbers such as 7 or 14 seems like a little bit out of place.
can it be a 14bit ADC or DAC?
say it’s a DAC, than the blocks can be some kind of resistive divider network?
This looks like a really old IC…
Haven’t seen an IC THAT big in a long long time…
bunnie’s blog…
…
It looks to me like they are LEDs on each side. The visible circuitry is driving one direction of an LED matrix, and the other direction is controlled by something else via the wires bonding the tops of the LED crystals together.
I would guess this is something like a 5×7 LED character driver, or perhaps one of those 70’s style electronic games with naked LEDs bonded to a board.
I would guess this particular piece of circuitry is a shift register. The 5 connections at the bottom of the picture would be Vcc, clock, data in, data out and ground (which is fuzzier than the rest) – or perhaps there’s separate logic ground and output current sink. I can’t see any connections at the top of the picture.
repost from a few days ago (before the CRAPMAN incident)
jcp Says:
January 8th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
1. The Chip appears to be just an addressable driver. With less than ten transistors per output pad.
2. The discrete devices appear to be LED’s (top emitting of course) arranged in a row column configuration. So it has to be a display. Seven rows, unknown number of columns. Probably two character 7×5 time multiplexed readout.
3. It’s hybrid technology (multiple devices bonded into one package) so its not cheap, and therefore probably not a game. Also it must be small.
4. Based on 2 and 3 above, its probably from the 70’s
5. based on 3 and 4 its probably a watch or calculator display.
My guess — early 70’s era LED watch driver chip.
-jcp-
maybe some sort of vu meter…?
So…what is it?!
God is on everyone’s side