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Semiconductor macro photos
The beauty of silicon.
After playing a bit around with macro photography recently, I decided to make some pictures of the die of several different semiconductors. The die is the silicon area which contains the integrated circuitry itself within a microchip.
For my first tries I have chosen EPROMs which are electrically programmable memories. To erase EPROMs, they have to be placed below a strong UV (ultra-violet) light for some time. Because of that, EPROMs have a small transparent window which makes it easy to look at the chip die directly.
As additional information: Normally, those windows are covered with a sticker to avoid unwanted erasure by sunlight.
I have taken several different types of older and newer EPROMs, cleaned the erasure window as good as possible and placed them below the macro lens of my digital camera. The results are quite impressive; have a look at the thumbnails below (you can view the full size pictures as well - be prepared for really big images!).
Please note that the sometimes strong chromatic aberration and optical distortions is not caused by my used lens system but by the poor optical quality of the EPROM erasure windows.

On the left you can see a ruler photographed with the same magnification as used in the pictures below. The magnification factor depends on your screen resolution and size. On my 100dpi TFTs, I get a magification factor of 75 (in case of the full size pictures, of course).

(Click thumbnails for full size pictures.)

AM27C020-150DC.jpg 2444 x 1602	AM27128A-2DC.jpg 1638 x 1188
AM27512DC.jpg 1665 x 2343	D27512-25.jpg 1632 x 1920
HN27C101G-17.jpg 2271 x 1920	iC27210-250V05.jpg 2226 x 1920
M5L2764K.jpg 1701 x 1579	Microchip27C256-20.jpg 1341 x 1578
NECD27256D.jpg 2205 x 1566	STM27C1001-15XFI.jpg 2560 x 1329
TMM41256C-15.jpg 1650 x 1824	TMS27C256-10.jpg 1278 x 705
TMS27C512-150.jpg 1353 x 981	WSi27C210L-20.jpg 2031 x 1920

Slideshow created with ShowIt ©2001-2004 Stefan Robl <stefan@qdev.de>

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