{"id":134979,"date":"2022-01-31T02:23:22","date_gmt":"2022-01-31T10:23:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/factory-defect-ic-revived-with-sandpaper-and-microsoldering"},"modified":"2022-01-31T02:23:22","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T10:23:22","slug":"factory-defect-ic-revived-with-sandpaper-and-microsoldering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/factory-defect-ic-revived-with-sandpaper-and-microsoldering","title":{"rendered":"Factory Defect IC Revived With Sandpaper And Microsoldering"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

We might be amidst a chip shortage, but if you enjoy reverse-engineering, there\u2019s never a shortage of intriguing old chips to dig into \u2013 and the 2513N 5\u00d77 character ROM is one such chip. Amidst a long thread probing a few of these<\/a> (Twitter, ThreadReader link<\/a>), [TubeTime] has realized that two address lines were shorted inside of the package. A Twitter dopamine-fueled quest for truth has led them to try their hand at making the chip work anyway. Trying to clear the short with an external PSU led to a bond wire popping instead, as evidenced by the ESD diode connection disappearing.<\/p>\n

A dozen minutes of sandpaper work resulted in the bare die exposed, making quick work of the bond wires as a side effect. Apparently, having the bond pads a bit too close has resulted in a factory defect where two of the pads merged together. No wonder the PSU wouldn\u2019t take that on! Some X-acto work later, the short was cleared. But without the bond wires, how would [TubeTime] connect to it? This is where the work pictured comes in<\/a>. Soldering to the remains of the bond wires has proven to be fruitful, reviving the chip enough to continue investigating, even if, it appears, it was never functional to begin with. The thread continued on with comparing ROMs from a few different chips [TubeTime] had on hand and inferences on what could\u2019ve happened that led to this IC going out in the wild.<\/p>\n

Such soldering experiments are always fun to try and pull off! We rarely see soldering on such a small scale, as thankfully, it\u2019s not always needed, but it\u2019s a joy to witness when someone does IC or PCB microsurgery to fix factory defects<\/a> that render our devices inoperable before they were even shipped. Each time that a fellow hacker dares to grind the IC epoxy layers down and save a game console<\/a> or an unidentified complex board<\/a>, the world gets a little brighter. And if you aren\u2019t forced to do it for repair reasons, you can always try it in an attempt to build the smallest NES<\/a> in existence!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We might be amidst a chip shortage, but if you enjoy reverse-engineering, there\u2019s never a shortage of intriguing old chips to dig into \u2013 and the 2513N 5\u00d77 character ROM is one such chip. Amidst a long thread probing a few of these (Twitter, ThreadReader link), [TubeTime] has realized that two address lines were shorted [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1523,38,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-engineering","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}