The Ware for August 2017 is below.
I removed a bit of context to make it more difficult — if it proves unguessable I’ll zoom out slightly (or perhaps just leave one extra, crucial hint to consider).
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2017 at 12:23 am and is filed under name that ware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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It looks like RGB LED with integrated driver
This appears to be a set of strain gauges, possibly for a load cell.
Thin film resistor network:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rxy-VpSDPg4
Definitely looks like a small IC die photographed through some sort of clear packaging. The four leads look like some sort of WS28xx RGB LED. The large area of the devices by the top three pads look like some sort of driver transistors. Outputs for the next LED in the chain?
A capacitive strain or pressure gauge was my first thought but I like emek’s resistor network idea better. This looks to be pretty small, did it come out of a multimeter?
The dark blob is suspicious though. IC covering? Or just obfuscation?
I don’t think it’s a ws28XX, since the last ones I looked at were multiple die, due to different processes for each emitter. Are those finger structures pin drivers? I’m really at a loss.
This is a heating element
The output transistors are not all the same size and you add that with the asymmetric traces from the 4 pads to the (C)MOS transistors, I would hazard a guess of an IC with different drive strengths? Maybe a regulator? Assuming that it has been decapped…
Trying to guess something different here…
Most likely some form of displacement/vibration based sensor here. My guess is some pre-MEMS era mm-scale microphone? The way the plates are arranged and connected seems plausible as some sort of capacitive mic (?)
Looks like signal delay lines, and they are all different, so some kind of sync-matching device?
Is it the chip buried under the lands on a credit card?.
Reminds me of a candle flicker LED IC, but I’m thinking RFID or proximity card controller.
The picture seems to be taken with a camera through a microscope. This looks like some sort of integrated circuit, you can clearly see the bond-wires on the pads at the left. The area next to the pads might be some output stage and the rest of the die contains the control circuitry. It seems the lower Pad is common to the right side of the output stage and might be GND. I wonder if the four pads shown are all the device has or if there are more on the other side.
Thick bonding wires and large silicon area looks like some sort of power transistor arrangement. Maybe part of a 3-phase dc motor driver module of some sorts?
The decapsulated strain guage chip from a set of electronic bathroom scales!