419: Fission Chips

Eric Schlaepfer and Windell Oskay are the authors of Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components. We discussed the inner beauty of a number of electronic components as well as cameras, photography, writing, preparing samples, and terrible title puns.

You can pre-order the physical book and get a digital early release copy at NoStarch.com/Open-Circuits

Windell is co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory (@EMSL). He and Eric have collaborated before on several projects:

• The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer 

• The 555SE Discrete 555 Timer

• The XL741 Discrete Op-Amp Kit

• The 741SE Discrete 741 Op-Amp

Eric is also known for the Monster 6502, a 6502 processor made up of individual transistors. Eric also writes on tubetime.us and is on Twitter as @TubeTimeUS

Sign up for the Embedded newsletter by the end of July and be entered to win one of these lovely prizes:

• The Three Fives Kit: A Discrete 555 Timer (two)

• A copy of Open Circuits (one)

Transcript

A lovely reject from the book, this is the base of a neon bulb from GE.

352: Baby's First Hydrofluoric Acid

John McMaster (@johndmcmaster) told us about the process of opening up chips to see how the processors are structured and what the firmware says. 

See John’s website for information on getting started (as well as digging much deeper).

John has given some interesting Hardwear.io talks including Capturing Mask ROMs and Taming Hydrofluoric Acid to Extract Firmware. His talks and many others are available on the Hardwear.io archive. Or sign up for the Hardwear.io Online Hardware Security Training, Berlin Jan 2021.

As mentioned in the show:

• John wrote a blog post about his top lab accidents and explosions.

• Paper: Reverse engineering Flash EEPROM memories using Scanning Electron Microscopy by Franck Courbon, Sergei Skorobogatov, and Christopher Woods

• Rompar and bitract are the two programs mentioned as helpful for getting from an image to binary code.