Back to Troy, NY

After spending the summer in Cambridge, MA and back to SF Bay area for a few weeks, I've been back to Troy, NY. What makes Troy special? I'll tell you...

Luxurious homes

Expensive cars

Booming industry

And fine art

Okay, so its not quite as bad as I make it look, but most of these were taken pretty close to my apartment. To be fair, they've been knocking down a lot of the old buildings and graffiti is pretty rare except when this construction wall went up at RPI and people went nuts. I'll omit those pictures as if the first pictures don't get me hate mail, I get the feeling RPI might give me a "strong suggestion" to take down the latter.
Now that the small talk is out of the way, on to business. Although I haven't been posting anything, a lot has been happening. First, the microscope I previously mentioned never came, but eBay refunded me. However, my room-mate bought a metallurgical microscope with USB camera, so I'm better off than ever. Being off campus now, I also have less restrictions and don't have to deal with RA BS and such. One perk of my apartment is that I got some lab space in an area that's being remodelled. Its going to go away in January, but I'm hopefully moving out then anyway, so that shouldn't really effect me. The end effect of this is that I'm finally getting a chance to do all of the stuff I wanted to before and actually have some time and space to try things out.
I've imaged a bunch more IC pictures. In particular, I have images of discrete transistors, fully delayered 7404 hex-inverter, and other ICs.

3906 top metal
Old TMS320 logo section

On that note, a die image archive was started at http://intruded.net:8080/wiki/ Since I like Wiki's, I got myself an account and you should expect to see any die images I publicly release to appear there. I posted a few from a bit back, but haven't gone on a rampage yet. One of the things they are working on is getting a "Google Maps" style IC viewer for larger ICs. A crude test page is at http://intruded.net:8080/map/ (you'll have to zoom to correct level).

Map view test for large ICs

Regarding http://siliconpr0n.wikispaces.com/, I recently got permission from Sergei P. Skorobogatov to include images from his Semi Invasive Attacks paper on the Wiki as long as they are credited to him. So, along with the other material I've been accumulating from my own research, expect some rapid expansion on the Wiki in the near future.
After delayering a few 7400 series ICs, I've realized I had in fact been at the transistor layer before, but just didn't understand what I was looking at. Probably bad been confused by all of the MOS pictures I had seen? In any case, I tried a 74163, but found it was too complex to start with. I could only recognize a handful of components. A few days ago I delayered a 7404 which should provide a much cleaner reference circuit since its small and more or less split into 6 regular units. Unfortunately, I let it sit for a while without agitating it, so it crystallized a bit, but should be fine for my purposes.

7404 transistors

A quick overview of the techniques I currently use and why. Most ICs are in epoxy. I boil them in 70% nitric until the epoxy is removed. Lacking an ultrsonic cleaner, I wash them in room temp 3% HF for about a minute to clean the surface. This takes a thin layer off the top, which removes most debris. Then, depending on how patient I'm feeling, either room temperature or near boiling 3% HF to delayer the IC. If I want to keep it suitable for live analysis (mostly my roommate has been doing this), a Dremel "drill press" with a small endmill is used to make a cavity above the die. We use a rough estimate, usually slightly above the pins, to guess how far to go down. The package is pre-heated to 300F and a drop is put on top, allowed to etch, and washed with acetone before it dries out. Heating the acid doesn't seem to make a difference as its heat is negligible (plus transfer cool off) compared to many IC packages. I also played around briefly with another low cost method that is more automatic but less selective, I'll try to post something on that soon.
Finally, I'm interviewing with various companies and looking for a job, so if you think you might be interested in me, feel free to send me an e-mail at JohnDMcMaster gmail.com.