 Hello chip friends, and welcome to my chip lab. I'm going to show you how I process an image of a chip. I won't show you decapping the chip since I've already covered that in a previous video. Today's target is a Texas Instruments Plastic Packaged 74LS01 chip manufactured in 1986. First, I place the chip under my inspection microscope and take a couple pictures of the top and bottom so that I have a record of the chip's markings. Then, I decap the chip. Boom! Done! Now, I need to fix the bare die to something convenient and less likely to blow away. I use the lids from ceramic chips which have a nice flat surface. I use a drop of cyanoacrylate glue and spread it around. The die doesn't have to be perfectly straight since I can compensate by rotating the microscope stage, but of course it does have to be right side up. Then, I just have to wait for the glue to dry before I can move on. While I'm waiting, I grab a small container and make a label for it. The chip's number, manufacturer, date code, and decap date go on the label. 74LS01, TI, 10th week, 1986. I wonder what the top of the charts was back then. Oh, Curie by Mr. Mr. I miss the 80s, especially that hair. Now I take the carrier and fit it into one of these 3D printed holders. The holder goes on the microscope stage to prevent the chip from moving under vibration. Now, I adjust the stage's rotation, tip, and tilt to get the chip perfectly square in all axes relative to the microscope. This lets me move the stage around without having to worry about losing focus. Now it's time to work with the camera. I set it up in manual mode. Then I refocus the microscope onto the camera's image sensor because it's a different distance from the chip than the eyepieces were. Then I move the chip to the initial position for scanning. I power up the servos and the Beaglebone driver, which is running machine kit. For now, I enter the gcode manually to control the stage, because I haven't gotten around yet to writing an automated shell script. Each picture has a 50% overlap, which makes it a lot easier for the stitching program to stitch the images together later. With my setup, one picture is 600 micrometers by 400 micrometers. With the die scanned, I can take the card out of the camera and move it to my computer. I copy the images off the card into a directory for the chip. Then I fire up ICE, Microsoft's Image Composite Editor. Then I select the images for stitching and setup various parameters such as number of columns and rows, and importantly, the hint for 50% overlap. ICE goes to work, and shortly I have a stitched image. Now I just crop the image to get rid of the borders and export to high quality JPEG. I run the result through Microsoft Photos and just let it do an auto-enhanced so that the image pops. Now for this particular chip, the top metal layer obscures a lot of the detail underneath, so I need to de-layer the chip. First I etch away the top glass layer with armor etch. Then I put the chip in a solution of 6 parts, 3% hydrogen peroxide, with one part, 32% hydrochloric acid. This eats away the metal in about 15 minutes, but there's more glass underneath the metal, so I have to use the armor etch again. Another round of scanning, and the de-layered image is ready to go. I use Inkscape to trace the components on the die. The base images go in first, then I trace out resistors, collectors, bases, emitters, metal layer, shot key and regular connections, and finally labels for pins and components. Next, I put together a schematic in KiCad. Finally, I upload all the images and files and prepare a page on the project 5474.org wiki, and tweet about it. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this look into how I deconstruct a physical chip into its informational content. Even though it didn't look like it, all the steps I've talked about can take days. I also do blog posts and make videos, and also search for chips that I don't have. It's a lot of work. To keep me motivated, I've set up a Patreon account where you can support my work. You can click here or see the link down in the description. Supporters get access to exclusive content and they can interact with me directly and help me decide which chip to cover next. I really appreciate any support you might give.