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Adam McCombs @nanographs
, 6 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter
The SiTime 1532 is a MEMS osilator used inside of modern Apple devices and is responsible for the iPhones getting getting bricked by Helium thing. I decapped a few of them and imaged them under my SEM. You can see the "tunning forks" responsible for generating the 33kHz clock.
Decaping the device cleanly is difficult, what makes it special is how small it is. Instead of being packaged in epoxy like most devices it's entirely encased in silicon, making it challenging to cleanly open up. Regardless it produces some great SEM images.
The entire device is only 1.5mm x .8mm, with the osilator itself being the little square on top. The first step is separating the osilator from the other half of the device. After that it's a matter of figuring out how to hold and then crack open the osilator.
After some clever mounting in an Ultra Microtome so I can very carefully slam the chip into a glass knife, I was able to split the package open to reveal the inner workings of the device and get it under the SEM.
Here is some video of the decaping with the Ultra Microtome. Normally this thing is used to cut ultra thin sections for Transnsmission Electron Microscopy.
If you want to learn more about this chip, why helium kills it, and another way of decaping it, check out @BenKrasnow's video on it. I'm going to try the sanding method later today.
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