I love looking inside chips, and Flylogic takes some of the sweetest chip shots. bushing sent me some Wii chips to play with a few weeks ago, and Chris at Flylogic expertly decap’d and imaged them for me. I thought they were pretty neat, so here’s a couple of them to share with you:

The chip above is the Macronix mask ROM part inside the Wii. It also has some SRAM and a real time clock on-die. The large block on the left is the mask ROM, and the smaller block on the right is the SRAM. The top right has a fairly regular arrays of flip-flop like logic structures, so those are probably command or address registers for the chip.

The chip above is the serial EEPROM chip that’s flip-mounted onto the Hollywood package. The Hollywood GPU on the Wii actually consists of three silicon chips on a single substrate, as the image below shows. The serial EEPROM is indicated by the pink arrow.

The bond pads still have the flip-mounting bumps on them, so they show up as large black circles in the photo. Flylogic later removed the bumps using a neat hack with their wirebonder, and then rebonded the die into an 8-pin DIP so the contents could be read out with a conventional ROM burner. I found it particularly enlightening to see the ratio of logic versus the size of the actual memory array for the serial EEPROM (the memory array is the regular set of cells in the top-right corner). Essentially, at this capacity scale (2048 bits), you’re paying for a bunch of logic, and not much memory. Doubling the memory capacity would minimally impact the overall die size, since most of what’s on there looks to be flip flops for shift registers and command latches.

The ware for January 2008 is shown below. Click on the image for a much larger version.

This photograph isn’t of the whole unit, it’s just of one (important) part of it; but I think that’s part of the challenge. I believe there are enough hints buried in the photograph for one to deduce exactly what product this comes from.

This month, I will again be able to offer a dent-and-scratch chumby as a prize. Have fun!

The ware from December 2007 was a Philips AJL308 “Clock Radio”.

It’s a nice past-time of mine to go to the local retail store, buy something off the shelf that looks relevant to my area of interest, and take it apart. I did a little tear-down writeup which I share as a link with anyone who cares to read it; it’s a lot of words and images for a blog post. These days, an alarm clock radio with a graphic LCD screen is interesting from my perspective and I can learn a thing or two from the design choices made by Philips in creating a product like this. I saw it on the shelf at Meijer’s while I was doing my last-minute Christmas shopping, so I got one, took it home and plucked it apart. Yes, this is what I do when I go home for Christmas; then again, it didn’t phase my parents at all to see alarm clock guts all over the dining room table. It’s just what curious kids do, right?

As for the winner, it’s super-hard to pick a winner this time; so many thoughtful posts. I think I’ll have to go with Dave Z this time — he did get the answer exactly right; if it wasn’t for his third post talking a bit more about his analysis and methods for arriving at it, he would have been beaten out by some of the other quality posts that didn’t quite arrive at the right answer but had great insight. Congratulations, contact me for your prize!