The Ware for June, 2005 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger view. Yes, this month’s Ware is a silicon chip!

For this month’s contest, I am not just looking for the generic type or family of chip that this belongs to, I am giving extra points for guesses that include a stab at the exact part number of this device. I believe there is roughly enough information in this die shot for a very clever and astute contestant to reduce this chip to only a handful of possible chip part numbers. Also, as usual, I am looking to see your thought process in addition to an accurate answer.

I have pixelated the manufacturer’s logo in the upper left hand corner, because it would be a dead giveaway of the ware. If nobody guesses this ware in the next couple of weeks, I will post a picture of the logo as a hint for our contestants.

I figured I’d also give y’all a quick tour around some of the interesting features on this chip. Here is a set of codes that help us identify the routing stack of the chip:

You can see that there are two levels of polysilicon (the transparent gray-ish letters) and three layers of metal. When viewed through the microscope, one can determine the relative depth of each layer by adjusting the focus point of the microscope.

Here is a zoom-in of a memory array (I’ll tell you more about this array in the solution next month):

Here is what looks to be part of an A/D converter:

Here is what looks to be a Dickson-style charge pump:

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 11th, 2005 at 5:37 am and is filed under Hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.