Silicon Chip Images

mawyatt · Post by **mawyatt** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 2:02 pm

Rik,

I did do some retouching, sorry if was misleading on this. However it was relatively minor, most was touching up the shadows and debris on and around the chip.

At the pixel level you can see some bleeding artifacts, but generally it's not bad if I follow the recipe described above.

Early on I did have to so some serious editing with bleeding and misalignment, especially with the wirebonds.

steveminchington · Post by **steveminchington** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:39 pm

That last crop is awesome... do the lights in your street go dim when you start shooting?

mawyatt · Post by **mawyatt** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 4:33 pm

Steve,

Thanks, and yes the light blink in the house!! When the strobes fire they all recharge at the same time, which causes the lights to slightly dim!

Here's the image I posted on your thread.

I can't seem to post other images though, I am home now so this is from my Mac. Before I left work I tried your idea with a pre scaled image @ 1024 horz pixels in png format, but still having trouble.

This image in a work in process. I am not happy with the micro-contrast among other things. I have what i believe is a better version.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 5:13 pm

mawyatt wrote:Before I left work I tried your idea with a pre scaled image @ 1024 horz pixels in png format, but still having trouble.

PNG files are usually much larger (more bytes) than JPEG files of the same image size (same pixel counts). This is because PNG files cannot compress very tightly.

If you try to upload a file that is within the limits of 1024x1204 pixels, but is longer than 300 KB (kilobytes), then the upload is guaranteed to fail.

--Rik

GemBro · Post by **GemBro** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 5:45 pm

... that 2nd to last image (the crop) is mighty fine Mike ... d@mn that is clean, even though you done a bit of Post on it ... the one above is great too ... well done ...

I suppose the strobes are giving that much uniformed light it's simulating the great outdoors type of lighting? ... would be nice to see if this could be reduced to a cheaper version ...

... I have studio lighting I could break out but I wouldn't be able to move in my office if I setup my portrait studio ...

I would call this 'Semi-Porn' ... you could take that a few different ways

... but I do like a close up of an IC chip ... reminds me of those old classic 80's IC wafer shots in electronics/science magazines years ago ... but higher quality ...

mawyatt · Post by **mawyatt** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 6:32 pm

Rik,

I could not get Lightroom to compress this image to 300KB, so I cropped it into 3 separate images, but at least I got them to upload!!

This is a chip I found in our lab trash that has mangled solder balls that have been severely oxidized. A good chip would have shinny solder balls that look like tiny spherical mirrors. I have images of such, but these are chips I can't show the public..sorry. In fact the best image I have is of a chip I can't show!!

Anyway, this image was shot with the dual light tent and strobes with techniques I have described. I wish I could show the true image details (the images look very muted here) and am really glad that folks like these images (thanks Steve and Gem), and don't want to hog this thread, hopefully others will be able to get into this topic.

Cheers,

Mike

mawyatt · Post by **mawyatt** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 7:03 pm

Here's a crop of a crop to get this to fit within the upload limit. This was taken with the single tent configuration, strobes and a styrofoam cup over the subject. Note the heavy wirebond shadows on the chip edges.

GemBro · Post by **GemBro** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 7:21 pm

Brilliant shots again ...

Haha seeing those balls reminds me of reballing chips ... and then on the domestic front, doing a reflow on an Xbox 360 recently, for my Niece (Micro$oft's bad design bent the motherboards, causing the main chips to pop off, hence the RRoD errors) ...

Love those colours of the die in the last image ... I think you got the lighting sussed Mike ... I would be very happy with those images ...

I need to rip open some more electronics ...

mawyatt · Post by **mawyatt** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 7:41 pm

Thanks Gem. That must have been fun reflowing those chips on the Xbox!! Hopefully you were successful and now a hero to your Niece!!

GemBro · Post by **GemBro** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 8:48 pm

I am that ... still running after 6 months ... CPU & GPU chips ... used a hot air gun and sprayed liquid flux underneath ... not a permanent fix mind ...

...

Yousef Alhabshi · Post by **Yousef Alhabshi** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 9:14 pm

I enjoyed watching all the works here.. brilliant

steveminchington · Post by **steveminchington** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 5:10 am

Superb shots Mike - I particularly like the last one with the great colours. Your painstaking approach obviously pays off. So are these chips sealed in some kind of material? I only ever see them as black squares of plastic!

mawyatt · Post by **mawyatt** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 7:03 am

Yousef,

Thanks.

Steve,

The ones with wirebonds are mounted in QFN packages, the ones with solder balls will be mounted face down onto a substrate. When in high quantity production the chips are usually encased in plastic, but some of the high performance processors are mounted in special packages that also house decoupling capacitors. The processor in your PC is a good example.

Since we develop chips (images are chips we or our design partners have developed), we get them before they are packaged or packaged in packages that have removable lids. We don't actually fabricate the chips, that's done by IBM, TSMC and others, we do the chip design.

Cheers,

Mike

mawyatt · Post by **mawyatt** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 7:29 am

Here's a couple of highly cropped images of good solder balls. Note the small dimples at the top of the solder balls, this is the result of a wafer/chip probing technique to evaluate the chip performance. Polyimide membrane probes are developed that make electrical contact will all the solder balls, allowing chip testing before packaging.

Note the result of my heavy handed tweaser use!! Also note the black dot in the solder ball top, this is the reflection of the objective lens.

abpho · Post by **abpho** » Thu Dec 18, 2014 9:07 pm

Mawyatt, these images are brilliant. Love it. It's perfect.