[eebynight]

I love posts like these. For more of this stuff I recommend checking out ZeptoBars.

https://zeptobars.com/en/

Lots of die shots and I’m always blown away by the beauty of some chips when designers fully know it is unlikely their art will see the light of day.

[magicalhippo]

There's also https://www.richis-lab.de/index.htm

He goes into a bit more detail and explanations, and has some interesting comparisons between different versions of chips (especially fake vs original). In German, but Google Translate does a good enough job.

One of my favorites is of the LTZ1000[1] ultra-stable voltage reference. An interesting (IMHO) read about the LTZ1000 can be found here[2].

[1]: https://www.richis-lab.de/REF03.htm

[2]: https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/analog/article...

[hermitdev]

Back in college, when I was studying Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI), I was working on an 8-bit adder. There definitely interesting art to it. It just looked beautiful. We were doing layouts by hand (on the computer, I mean we weren't relying upon an automated layout). I don't know how many iterations I went through trying to minimize latency and area. I remember it being at least a dozen. We had a sort of informal competition (mostly for bragging rights) for the least latency and area. IIRC, I think we were using Cadence to hand-draw the layouts. Lab time was definitely at a premium.

[jcims]

Very cool. Second die down is a pretty neat UWB transceiver that is build for real-time location services using multiple strategies (TDoA, ToF, etc). Looks like a little of that rf black magic on the right.

[Gibbon1]

The blue highlighted circular structures I believe are rf inductors.

[colejohnson66]

Also check out electronupdate on YouTube. He does lots of decapping of ICs just for the die shots. https://www.youtube.com/user/electronupdate