Pentium-III autopsy
Interesting stuff.  The method of inverting the die and bonding it to the processor carrier is called Flip-Chip (<a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Flip_chip" rel="nofollow">https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Flip_chip</a>), and replaced bonding wires for higher density and better thermal properties (you get direct access to the back of the silicon substrate)<p>The electron microscope images are all cross-sectional, because it appears he doesn't have the equipment to do surface etching, and just cleaved the chip. I've not generally seen good sectional images around though, so it's definitely an interesting look.<p><a href="http://www.flylogic.net/blog/" rel="nofollow">http://www.flylogic.net/blog/</a> has a lot of stuff about depackaging and reverse-engineering chips, as does "Dr Decapitator" (<a href="http://decap.mameworld.info/" rel="nofollow">http://decap.mameworld.info/</a>), who decaps old arcade ROMs, and then extracts their <i>actual data</i> from micrograph images to produce romfiles for emulators.<p>Edit:<p>The Sparkfun Saga of the Fake MCUs:<p>Part 1: <a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kMgE8BEttl0J:www.sparkfun.com/news/350" rel="nofollow">https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kMgE8B...</a><p>Part 2: <a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mEZ-8gGcwukJ:www.sparkfun.com/news/364" rel="nofollow">https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mEZ-8g...</a><p>Part 3: <a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3Tlcu2MhTp0J:www.sparkfun.com/news/384" rel="nofollow">https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3Tlcu2...</a><p>(Links via google cache because they seem to have broken their old news URL structure)<p>Edit^2: I forgot I had this old image of a System-in-Package radio module that I made myself (Digital camera through optical microscope at, iirc, 20x)<p><a href="http://metavore.org/faff/chip.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://metavore.org/faff/chip.jpg</a><p>The thick black lines at the bottom are millimetre markings on a ruler. The processor is at the centre, and the various other modules are SAW filters (<a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SAW_filter#SAW_filters" rel="nofollow">https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SAW_filter#SA...</a>)