Hi welcome to the Eev blog! Clean Room or not so clean room, Why am I wearing a Clean Room bunny suit you might ask? good question. Well we've got the ever popular mailbag segment. very special one today. Inside this box is a whole bunch of Uh Semiconductor Fab paraphernalia courtesy of Vincent Hy uh, he's called Free Electron on the EV blog forum and is very kindly sending a whole bunch of stuff.

So it's very apt that I'm wearing a bunny suit. Let's check it out. and here is the complete Clean Room Bunny suit. This is a uh, three-part one.

It's got a hood on uh which goes on first and then it's got the overalls which go uh, the hood is tucked inside the overalls like this and then it comes with um KNE high boots like this which then go over. this is way too big for me. this is like extra extra large and I'm only 5'9 in the Old Money Slim build. so yeah, not exactly.

uh so parachute do it. MC Hammer you know, no sorry I can't do it. Um, but yeah. um, these are, um, an static of course with that conductive fibers in them.

and uh, this is a typical bunny suit in any sort of a clean room. Usually they'll have like a mask for the really serious clean rooms and gloves as well. Uh, designed to stop any fibers contaminating, Uh, the air. basically.

uh, skin cells. A lot of dead skin cells just come off your body. clothing fiber, uh, hair things like that designed to stop all that and this is an old one. It has been washed many, many times, it's actually worn out.

The conductive thread in there doesn't pass the limit anymore, hence they, uh, expire them after a certain date and that's why I've got this one here. and yes, you can wear your shoes inside you. just the boots are really big and you can just, uh, slip them over your regular shoes and you can see inside here that there's actually uh, two zipper layers because well, you can't just rely on one zipper layer so there's one and then two that fully protect all your clothes and the hood is T Wow, that looks bad and you can see that the boots have like a uh stud thing here. plus the uh zipper which there we go got bare feet inside these but uh yeah, you can just slip your shoes inside there no problems at all and then goes the complete length.

so thank you very much Vincent he's from San Jose in California the heart of Silicon Valley So let's uh, rip this sucker open and see what we've got in here. It is quite a decent box. There's a whole lot of stuff so this video could go for a while. and by the way, Vincent said um, he will be posting more comments on the stuff in here on the Forum thread which will be linked down below.

Um, and so if you have any uh questions about this stuff, Vincent is the guy to ask and I'm sure he'll answer all questions. So let's have a look. we have some Photoshop chick. All right.

let's get down into the serious stuff. here we go. We got a whole bunch of envelopes to go through and a whole bunch of cool stuff all individually wrapped. Awesome! And there is some nonse stuff in here not associated with clean room stuff and this is San's Pico second.

Pulsa serial number one uh if you don't know Vincent uh um. built designer built one of these Jim Williams uh pulse generators and I think he was selling uh little kits of these some while back so we'll check that out. There you go, it actually comes as a kit. one of these nice little softsided Hammond uh PES and a whole bunch of parts.

This one is specifically for San to put together I don't think he's into SMD stuff yet. but anyway, I have to do a second uh, video on that. build this sucker up and uh, just test it out. But yeah, I think it's in the order of you know 25300 Pak a second Rise time or something like that and in this packet we have a bond out.

uh Chip he thinks it's for the 87c 5532 uh processor. So I've done uh, a video on um emulator uh thing in the past and these were you know, really old school stuff used for emulators so let's check this out and here it is. It's an emulator board which plugs into your system under test like this and you'll notice that there's two rows of BGA um uh type pins like that. and but the actual processor up here is a Bond Out version of the chip.

which means it has access, Um, a special version of the chip they manufacture or they used to manufacture back in the old days before JTAG on chip, serial debugging all took over. It's almost completely eliminated the entire market and need for these special Bond Out chips. Anyway, the manufacturers would manufacture a special version of each Uh processor like this. Very very expensive.

but uh, you would get one of these just to allow access to all the internal stuffs that they can debug. It's all. these extra pins on the chip allow you access to all the internal stuff and that's why this Bond Out version of the chip is actually um, bigger and contains more pins than the chip. The in this case an 8051 processor that it's actually emulating.

And in here we have some Tqfp lead frames. These are the lead frames that are used in as part of the chip manufacturing process. The D goes inside this and then the leads are formed and then it's encapsulated. Let's take a look and here it is.

It's actually uh, quite long and I will get the macro lens out and show you a closeup of this. but uh, this is basically the copper uh sheet which the dye when they manufacture it when they after they uh cut it out. um they place it in the center here and then they bond over all the individual Um pads on the die, over to each individual leg on there and then this is what gets formed into the chip. So a chip like this uh te Qfp package one is essentially made up of uh, four different things.

One is this Uh lead frame which is the copper lead frame with the individual Uh pins and then we've got the Uh D which sits in the middle there I presume they glue it um onto the center somehow and then the bond wires which they will individually, then Bond over to uh from the pad on the die over to the the individual lead. So there's you know a welding machine that comes down and you know micro welding machine comes down and goes boop boop and wires each one of those individual wires over to each one of the pads and you can see why it's called a lead frame cuz it sits in a frame like this and I'll get another angle. this is actually sunken down this part and I'll show you the other side as well. At the moment all the pins are shorted out like this but uh as you can see once they all bonded over and everything else they would then slice off all of these pins somehow I Don't know whether they do laser or a big stamp or or a saw or whatever I'm sure Vincent can help us on that and then these leads are then formed into the individual pins and at a real shallow angle.

Hopefully you can see how that is actually sunken into the bottom of that there and on the bottom side you can see how that's actually uh, raised up like like that. so on the top side it's sunken in where the D goes and there we go. There's a bit better shot of that when the D just sits in the well like that and then the bond wires go up and over to the individual pins and after the dye is placed in there and it's bonded over, then it's encapsulated I.E gunked with the Uh black with the typical black plastic encapsulant that you find these chips in and then once it's all encapsulated like that, then it's actually uh, cut out. Then the leads are cut out and bent into your final chip.

But of course your individual leads aren't actually uh, copper. so there actually will be solder coated or lead free. Uh, solder coated. whatever uh type of finish that you UD your chiping and you can see how the ends of these little copper tabs aren't actually connected through to there.

and uh, that's actually quite a delicate little uh construction there, so they'd have to have when they're bonding these. They'd have to have some physical support under there so they'd have a custom uh, you know, well that this thing would uh, sit in to actually support all these individual pins. Otherwise, when the welding robot came down and tried to apply pressure and weld the individual wire the bond wire from each pin over to the pad on the die there, then well, you know it's going to jump around like a jumping castle there, so that's no good at all. So that would be fully supported.

and we have some BGA test burning sockets. Uh, some of them in in here are for the Uh bench testing for individual chips, others are ones that go inside the thermal chamber for long-term chip aging and these things are serious kickass. Look at that. Oh, if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it.

Well, actually you might be able to. This one here is Uh which is the burning socket is about $1,000 uh Worth or over $1,000 and this uh board level burn uh test one is about 300 bucks in uh quantity. So this is a PCB level uh, zero insertion force zif uh socket essentially for uh PCB level testing and the way you undo it is you just unscrew that it's got a lever on the side here and then Bingo you can lift that up and that material there is called uh toon material and uh you know it's a special type special uh, dialectric, uh constant for high frequency stuff and basically that this is a for a specific Uh number of type of BGA pin with that specific uh footprint and what you would do with this typically is here's the bottom of it and you can probably see those pins sticking out the bottom there where you would obviously uh design your board. So then you can screw this into your board and these tiny little pins there make uh contact with the BGA pads on your board.

So instead of soldering your chip directly onto the board, you insert this uh zero insertion force test socket and then you can plonk your BGA chip on there and bingo Yeah you are going to get some uh signal Integrity issues doing that so you would have to take that into account. So obviously that would be uh, very carefully designed with uh, you know the the dimensional tolerance and everything else just to give the exact right amount of pressure on the chip there so you don't damage the balls when you screw that up and after you screwed it up got a nice hole in the top. you can still read your part number and yes they are Pogo pins. Look at that.

we can push those up and down so when you screw this into the board of course it applies just the right amount of pressure. They got a little individual spring behind those. If you haven't seen Pogo pins before, they're designed to give a um, fairly consistent amount of pressure onto the pad on your your the BGA pad onto your Uh PCB and uh, these things work really well. So that's why they aren't cheap.

I Mean you know, 300 bucks a socket in volume? really? Uh, for a specific type? Um, yeah, they just take a lot of manufacturing. You can see when I push my finger up from the bottom, push those Pogo pins up. you can see that there looks like a crown arrangement to sit onto the or to apply pressure to the bottom of the ball on the BGA chip that would be specifically designed to get a nice even pressure on the ball and not damage it. and this sexy one with the brass screw top on here.

it works exactly the same way. It's a different material though. This gray material is like a Teflon type material. good for up to 10 GHz So that's why this thing is bloody expensive.

You know, over $1,000 uh socket? No problems whatsoever. This one's got a bit of, um, just a Ppcs on the back there, but it could of course go into the board and these are designed to go into thermal Chambers for longterm, uh, temperature, aging and uh, stuff like that for the various chimps. Once again, it's a specific design specifically for one particular type and pin count BGA package and it works the same way. Just unscrew that which provides the even pressure and then you can release the lever like that and Tada we're in like Flynn And once again, we have the individual Pogo pins down in there and these are already being uh pushed up by virtue of the Uh P specs screwed into the bottom of this thing.

Once again, you can see the BR configuration on that Pogo pin. It's got four little uh points there which wrap around the ball and that's manufactured by a company called Winway and here's an image from the Winway website showing that they also do really ultra high performance coaxial sockets as well that uh can go up to 30 gig when just those individual uh, regular Pogo pins Aren't Enough Being they can actually manufacture specific Uh devices tailored to your requirements w a man. don't ask the price on those so you can picture hundreds or even thousands of these sitting inside some big climate controlled chamber for you know, days, weeks, months. um, being you know, life tested.

So really phenomenal stuff. And that's why some chips are. you know, really expensive because they have to be individually, uh, thermally tested in something like this in a big climate chamber. Probe needle, time for probing, dies and things awesome.

Now of course, to test silicon. Wafers you've got to have a big automated test machine which comes down with, you know, hundreds of little probes which come down and then uh, actually onto the pads on the be die and individually test each one. And of course, performance can be an issue. You can't just come down with a set of regular uh Pogo pins as we saw in those test sockets and then have a cable go you know, going off for, you know, even even 30 cm to some sort of amplifier stuff like that.

So what we've got here is some Fet probes which actually have a Fet right and a fet buffer right at the probe tip itself. and these yes, if you can read that, 100 nanometer tip nanometers, folks. And we have some regular Uh probes for the less high frequency stuff. 22 microns wide like that with the actual point tip less than one micron.

Absolutely incred ible. And these are cat whisker probes and you can actually make Point contact diodes with this thing onto a wafer so you can make a you know, an old-fashioned uh Point contact uh geranium, uh radio with this thing. Anyway, this comes from the microm manipulator Co in Carson City that's it's. still Factory sealed for our protection.

Let's open it up and get the macro lens on there. But basically I don't think I'm going to have magnification good enough to see these tips prop and that is the best zoom I can get on that that's using my X 10 macro lens there. Look at that. So these are just the regular uh, tungsten probes that would be used just for general purpose.

Uh Point contact die testing. And here are our tungsten probes and you might think, well, yeah, okay, they're pretty huge, but what? You you might have to view this in HD But in there you can see a tiny little 22 micron wires coming out of that. Absolutely crazy. That's with the one micron tip on it.

Unbelievable. How do they even manufacture those? And there it is. You really do not want to go touching those with your finger if you get that embedded in your finger. Never get that bastard out.

So I Repeat the tip of that is one micron 1 millionth of a meter point on that. Now if you thought that a millionth of a meter was, uh, a small probe tip, this one is an order of magnitude smaller. again, 100 nanom .1 Micron Tip on that. You might have to view it in HD but it is right down there like that.

This is actually an active fet probe that's actually a Fet Believe It or Not designed for, you know, Um, basically high frequency performance because you got a tiny little probe tip there which goes down onto the wafer and then this fet which then buffers the signal to go up the coax. Now if you're curious about the physical construction of the Fet, then that probe wire going down there, of course that is connected to the gate of the mosfet. and then the drain is connected to the casing of the Pogo pin. Effectively, it's a coax um, pretty much a solid uh form coax there and the source is connected to the center pin of the coax over there.

And they are Pico probes from a company called Ggb Industries Inc in uh, Naples in Florida So you they specialize and probably sell these things for an absolute fortune and the only people who are going to use these are our wafer test Fabs So these things are just so stupidly tiny. They actually need uh, micro positioners to actually position the tiny little wire you can see maybe in HD out there onto the be die and that one's actually .1 Pea Farad gate capacitance with uh, shunted with one Meg and we have some Be chips in fact, chip on Flex time. Let's go all right. This is the top side so hopefully it won't fall out.

So we're looking for some bare dye here and uh, nothing yet. Tada There we go. Got some lovely be dye in this carrier. Oh so need the macro lens and I Really need a proper microscope to see that? of course.

but you can see that it's a uh, bare die and you can see the bonding pads on there. It's absolutely tiny. I Mean the total diameter of that is. Check it out one, two or just on 2 and 1/2 mm or so across.

Absolutely tiny. This is the full x 10 Zoom of my camera plus the Uh x 10 macro lens as well. If you're curious to see the back of that die, well, there's not much to see there at all. Next up we have ourselves a photo mask from DuPont photo masks.

so let's have a look. We've got ourselves the carrier here. look at the reflection on that beautiful and uh, it looks like they are really very rectangular. Hello there! I Am Beautiful mirror finish fantastic.

Um I'm going to have to probably get a light behind that or a sheet of paper to uh, be able to see uh, the the photo mask and when you need a poor man's light box, well just get out your mobile phone and use one of those apps to, uh, turn your screen completely white and now Tada we should be able to zoom in and see we're still getting Reflections off the ceiling which is really annoying, but we should be able to see at least uh as good as we can. without a microscope. we can see the photo masking there for the die. There we go.

we can see some of the circuitry on there. really need a better microscope to see that, but you can see the edge There they would be the are they the bonding pads Vincent Didn't say what this one was, but obviously some sort of uh array memory array architecture there something cuz it's pretty uniform all the way along. and uh I don't know. could be some sort of PL or something like that.

We've got some IO I presumably. Uh, we got some IO pads down the bottom of that, but uh yeah, not exactly sure what this thing is at all. and it's a very long, thin, narrow uh, die as well. so beats me I don't know Vincent Will have to clarify on that one and the really interesting stuff has only just begun.

Look at this. This is what's called a probe card and we'll get into the technical details of it. but this is the probe head which goes into the wafer. We'll get down there and see the individual uh probes.

but basically this thing comes down like this. This connects to the automated uh test machine for the wafer and this thing. basically they it. uh they position uh each Uh wafer and then each dye underneath here and then this comes down.

The probes in here, make contact with it and then with that particular D on the wafer and then test it. and if it passes or fails, there's part. Then there's an ink squirter in the middle which can then squirt the Dy as past or failed. So this is all part of a much larger big head.

but this is the test probe card for it. And yes, these are individually made by hand for each and every different chip variation. And if you think the tops impressive there, of course there's really, um, hardly anything solded on there. It's just had a couple of, uh, well, there's one relay on there, a couple of Tanum SM and a couple of other M SMD caps.

But obviously these are all, uh, points that are designed to be connected to. but you really want to see something impressive? Let's flip this sucker over. In fact, let's see the first impressive thing. Have you ever seen a board that thick that is 8 mm? I'm not kidding, that is an 8 mm thick.

PCB 24 layers. Unbelievable. Imagine what that costs alone. Is this the funkiest thing you've ever seen? All white? Well, let's take a look at the center here.

and yes, I will get the macro lens on that shortly. But basically all individually handwired. These are all handmade. I don't know who sits there and hand wires this thing.

but anyway, these wires aren't stripped. They got individual sleeves on them, which, uh, connect to the I'm not even sure how many pins are in there I Don't think I want to go there and count them, but we'll get in there. It probably looks like on my screen of the camera, it looks like one big contact at the moment, but there's probably you know, a 100 contacts on each side or something like that. So woo! This is incredible.

And this PCB ain't made in China that's for sure. There's obviously multiple wires uh, bonded to the same point, there bonded, fancy torque solded onto the same point. and look at that, all just individually flowing into just one side of that chip. and then if we bring the point contacts into view I Don't know, can you count those? I'm not going to bloody well count them, that's for sure.

And that's just crazy. Look at all those point contacts there. it looks like there's a couple of layers there. Actually, that is just insane.

If I get my probe up in there. those things are pretty bloody solid. Actually, they're really hard to really hard to budge. Oh yeah, I think I I Think this one has seen better days, that's for sure.

I Mean, look at all those, they're just bent n these are all. these are all ruin. But it does look like there are multiple layers and they're the ones who make this Advanced probe ink. This is probably all they do.

Ah, and that's why it looks like it's Jewel row because if you get right down in here sorry, my probe's just way too big for this. There is actually um, jeel height so they come in one on top of the other, but then they actually spread out to give you a higher density here. So it is just, um, the one row of pins along here contacting to the one row of uh, bonding points on the die. but then of course that you know that pitch there between those contacts is too small to then you know, drill individual holes through this head and feed them through.

That's why they have to split them out to um, you know, one above the other to get the pin pitch. I'm not sure what the diameter of those things are, but they got to feed each one of those through with their individual wires coming out. That's just insane. And yes, these are actually handmade, each individual one.

Somebody actually sits there and feeds each individual wire through and then forms them and you know and makes sure they're the correct length and then probably I don't know Glu them in place or something. just God how long would it take you to assemble something like that? I mean a unbelievable I'll never complain about A Rat's Nest again and hopefully you can see there that this entire thing, that entire center pin structure is actually raised up so that this thing can actually come down and make contact with the bare dye on the wafer. So you might think, well, you know this is insane I Mean to go to this level of complexity and have all that automated testing right on the bare die there? I Mean wouldn't it be easier to, uh, just assemble all the chips onto those lead frames we saw earlier. injection mold them and then, well, maybe even probe them at that stage or something like that.

Well, each stage of the semiconductor manufact or chip manufacturing process adds extra cost. and even though these things are ridiculously complex and you know, ridiculously expensive to build these automated test systems, once you've got them and you've paid that NRE that non-recurring engineering cost to set up, uh, the chip, it is actually cheaper to go around and then move the D underneath and Boop probe each one and then put a little uh, you know, black or red uh dot on each uh chip that actually fails. So then when you go to package them up, you know you only have to package up the good ones so you're only paying those extra for those extra manufacturing steps if you know the Bare Diey is no one good, because of course there's a thing called wafer yield And you know, on average you're only going to get a certain percentage depending on the technology if it's really bleeding edge stuff. um, you know, and your clean room is not absolutely perfect, you're going to get, you know, X percentage or even quite a high percentage of fire rates on your die.

So um, you know it makes sense to, uh, go to all this effort to test each one and this is just the head. This is just the probe head, let alone all the rest of the automated test machinery and all the mechanics and the Hydraulics behind the whole thing and all the automated handling and the software and the oh man, the At machines themselves. and yeah, forget it. but hey, it's worth it.

This is why these you know, uh, waer manufacturing and testing. uh Fabs because uh, the the same uh wafer by the way may not be tested in the same Fab that it's actually manufactured in. so they may actually ship them somewhere else to actually be tested and then packaged up. and I'm not sure if you can notice that here, but that uh, what you know, looks like a gold um sleeve over that.

they don't actually strip this wire. This is not like enamel coated uh wire you might be familiar with. the wire um is just bare and then they weld or solder that on first and then they slide this sleeve over the end of it. Each one of those is done by hand and these are supposed to have a contact lifespan of no, not in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even Millions but billions of contacts.

They basically do not wear out and now now we have some Wafers Yes, these are full 300 mm Wafers from a Fab and uh, apparently these carrier boxes rare as hen teeth. so uh, thanks to Vincent for actually getting those otherwise you cannot transport these things. They will just shatter and I Have to be incredibly careful with these. Handle them by the edges.

otherwise. Um, and if you drop it, you'll shatter it. And these things silicon. oh man.

Sharp as razor blade. so you're really SCE it a bits. So really, we have to be very careful here. but there's several wafers in here.

I Believe, See what we've got in here? We got some filler and our first wafer will be no, not under there, yet almost there. Almost there. Tada Oh look at that. Now this W for here is actually a silicon Geranium type wafer.

and no, this isn't the full 300 mm one. There are larger ones underneath and uh so this is a smaller wafer and this is actually has been Swn. So all the individual chips when we get up close to it all the individual d on there so this is called a wafer and then you've got the individual d on there. So each one of those is an individual chip and uh and this has actually been Swn so we can lift so well the machine can lift off the individual D and then place them on those uh frames which we saw at the start of the video and that's that's of course after they've been tested when our big probing plate moves over this or this could be fixed and they move the way for underneath and then it goes down Boop and then steps along and steps and repeats each single one of those die I don't know you want to count them but uh yeah, this thing goes around and then tests.

You know it could take hours. Uh, depends on the complexity of the test. to test a wafer or a day or something like that to test an individual wafer. Now as you can see, the wafer is uh, round and they're not shy about just going right to the edges there and uh, trying to maximize the absolute uh, maximum number of dye that they can fit on a round wafer like this.

And this is these are Swn with a diamond saw. Diamond saw just comes down. you know, real Precision stuff goes along there and actually makes all those cut marks in there and I'm not sure we should be able to lift off those but I probably don't want to. There are some that have already been lifted out of here.

you can see that there they've either fallen out or or have been lifted out and they're individual chip so this is how many they can fit on. What's this? A 200, just over 200 mm wafer? I Think so. there's a closeup of that and you can really see the saw marks. How this is real.

Precision Engineering Folks Absolutely phenomenal. Jeez, Look at that. You know a sore actually comes down and cuts these things. It's not laser mechanical saw and that is a sticky rubber membrane like that and uh, should just be able to lift those off.

Can pop them out like that? Look at that. Brilliant. Just lift that out and we should come to another wafer. Tada Looks like we got another 200 mm one and this one I am told is an 8051 processor.

Uh, we're not exactly sure what variant it is, but uh, that is. you know that's a reasonable size die. Actually, that's like 10 mm. Square So there's the edge of the wafer.

I'm not sure what happened to these ones over here. Some sort of chemical process went, uh, horribly. wrong there. Not sure, but doesn't matter.

Um, it's all about the total yield. And there we go. We can see the chip itself. Bon Pads around the outside.

This Zoom ain't the best, but uh yeah, that is a some variant of an 8051 processor and fortunately, this one is already nicely encased for us. Look at that and you can see the bottom part of that. Once again, this has already been um, Swn as well. but ah, love the color in that.

Doesn't that look stunning? Hello Tada I Can see myself in a wafer. And last but certainly not least, we have a 300 mm wafer which is basically as big as these suckers get. And look at that that is enormous. and I definitely do not want to be touching this sucker or trying to lift that out.

or if I do. got to do it via the edges incredibly brittle as I said they will, uh, shatter. So anyway, uh Vincent has given me a frame to try and put this into. Fingers crossed.

Um, but I won't do that in this video I will uh if I can successfully assemble it in a frame, I will and then I can uh have the thing up as a showpiece. Now this one hasn't been swn at all. so this is just the original uh diey straight off the line before it's been uh handled and uh yeah, not um that it looks like all that stuff on the outside is probably where they spun coated stuff would be my guess. um or you know Vincent would be able to tell us that or anyone who has any uh experience in the actual uh, bare, uh, silicon wafer manufacturing thing.

but I think that's you know how they put the layers on these things. They actually spin them out and apply codings and that's what it looks like. It looks like something's just dripped off the edges there. Anyway, there's our chip in the middle.

looks like two rows there of Bon pads so this one looks like very serious business and not sure what uh chip this is at all though. but uh yeah, it's a biggie. and I've just got one of these cheap uh USB microscopes here from 40 times to 800 times. They're not the best things, but they're really cheap.

Um, And I will uh Endeavor to have a look at a few things under here. Please excuse the lack of video capture here. I'm just pointing my camera at the screen, but uh, it should be good enough and there we can see the lead frame under there. We can see how the copper it doesn't look.

you know, it doesn't look, it doesn't have that gold sort of coppery color under here because the probably the LED bright light is uh, too bright on that. but you can see how the leads are formed and then the individual um Bond pads there which then get, uh jumped over with the bond wires. onto the die and here's one of these. that's whisker probes and that's a minimum 40 times zoom and you can see the sharp point on that and the world of the is it tungsten point I Think on that.

Anyway, that is. uh, that is quite interesting. that's a that's not a bad shot at all. Look at that and that is the probe tip superimposed on a .1 mm grid.

and now we're looking at our tungsten probe tip and I'll attempt to move this along here. It's incredibly difficult. This is the one with the 22 uh Micron shaft there and the one less than one micron probe tip I mean you can barely see it in there I It's just ridiculous I mean this camera is I'm not sure what the current Zoom setting is, but I'm not even close to. um, you would really need a real proper microscope.

These micros, you know, claim to be times 800 times. They're just garbage. and this here is one of the fat probes. one of the active probes that we saw and you can see the contact wire going off.

Once again, this is not the smallest uh one. This is not the 100 nanom tip one. this is the Uh 1 Micron tip one. And if we have a look at the other side of that fet.

Woohoo! look, Can you actually is that clear in there? You can actually see through that? That's actually quite. That's quite remarkable, really. Look at that. Wow.

Unbelievable. You can see the light through pin holes on the other side. and yeah, you can see those pin holes through that clear I Presume it's some sort of clear epoxy or something like that. Not really sure the physical construction of that.

it's uh, it's just remarkable. But look at the contact probe just coming off there. crazy and we have ourselves one of those bear dyes that we had in that uh little uh dye box before that had like a hundred of them in there and well I'll see if I can get the best zoom on this USB camera. but a man, it's just so tricky.

oh I can but it's just horrible and pixelated. Yeah, these USB cameras are just a a joke there. You know when you try and get in for really serious magnification, just don't bother really. But anyway, we can see part of a uh well, we can see like a quarter of the uh, die there and we can see the bond pads there and there.

We got some sort of marking there. We might be able to, uh, make that out if we can get it a bit clearer, but that's it's. pretty horrid. So just to show you what this USB microscope can do, I've got it flat against the uh paper at the moment that that D is lying on.

and that's right down at the bottom end. So that's like in the Times 40 position. so it has one focal point there and without adjusting the height of it, you zoom in, Zoom in, zoom in. It's absolutely useless for anything else until we get to a second point where we can actually get another focus at a higher.

Zoom I mean that's right at 800 so you know, assuming it's linear, it might be like 600 times or 500 times or something like that. and that is absolute maximum times 800. Zoom Which we can get on this thing. but look, ah, it's just horribly pixelated so an awesome duel.

Thumbs up to Vincent Hy Uh, Free Electron on the Evev blog forum for sending in all this fantastic um, very difficult to get semic Uor manufacturing stuff. So I hope that's giv you some insight into. you know, some of the stuff that goes on inside semiconductor wafer Fabs and testing. and if you want to, uh, ask any questions I'm sure Vincent will be happy to answer them on the Forum So the Forum thread will be down below and he can answer all your questions I'm sure.

So if you enjoyed that, please give the video a big thumbs up and give Vincent a huge shout out. I'll link to his website Silicon Valley Garage that'll be down below as well. Check it out! He's written a few books as well which we've had on the mail bag in the past. Awesome! Thanks! Vincent Best mail bag ever! Catch you next time I Look like a total dick thanks Vincent Hammer Time.