 Hi, so I thought today I would talk about decapsulating a chip, specifically this is a ceramic package chip, and you can tell that it's ceramic because you can click your finger on it and it sounds ceramic as opposed to plastic. It's not as black as the plastic package. It also has this sort of separation in here, and this separation is the adhesive, which is called glass frit. It's some sort of a paste with little glass particles in it that gets melted together when the package gets put together. Also, this is a 5400 series logic chip. This is a TTL chip as opposed to the 7400 series, which is also a TTL chip. However, the 5400 series has a higher temperature range, so it's called automotive grade, or sometimes even mill spec, and they typically come in ceramic packages because ceramic can take more heat, which is going to be an issue for us because we want to use a lot of heat to melt the glass frit and take off the top to get to the dye. I have a bernzomatic torch. This takes map gas. Map is methyl acetylene probodyne. It's a gas that reaches about 2000 centigrade in air. You can just buy this at any Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever. I also have a toolmaker's vise, which is a small, nice little vise, which is completely metal. It's not painted. It's not covered in rubber or plastic that will burn, so that's why I like this little compact vise. I also have this piece of aluminum. It's about 0.3 by 0.6 inches, which is nice because the legs on a small dip package like this are 0.3 inches apart, so you can just fit it under there to provide a base for heating. The larger chips will go on the 0.6 side. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put this in the vise, and I'm going to put it up against the legs so that it can't get away. I'm going to try to press it down so that it's nice and pressed up against the aluminum. I guess that's good, so not too tight. I also have a set of pliers that I'm going to use to every so often check the top to see if I can just flip it off. If I can flip it off, that means that the paste is all melted, which means the package has been decapsulated. Here we go. It will probably take about 20 seconds of heat. There is going to be the tip of the flame is going to be about here, and then there's going to be a large flame over here. We're not going to use the tip of the flame, which is the hottest part. We're going to use that sort of outer edge. About 20 seconds of heat should do it maybe, so let's see. There you go. There you have it. That's the die, which you can look at under a microscope, but basically that is how you decapsulate a ceramic chip very quickly and very easily. What happened was when I was taking the chip off with my pliers, because of course it's quite hot now, I dropped it on the concrete floor and it just cracked open. You do have to be pretty careful. You can see that, and there I go, dropping it again. So here, I'll just risk the burns. You can see that on this side, there are actually bond wires coming off of the leads, and those connect up to the die. Those got broken off, which is okay, I don't really care because I don't really care about the functionality of the chip. I just want to get to the die. Luckily the package did not fracture along with the die, so this is still usable, which is nice.