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by intricatedetail 2046 days ago
Is there a tech available currently to decap and photo chips at home? For example reverse engineering old PAL chips?
2 comments

These chip come in a ceramic package, so decapping is a simple matter of tapping along the seam with a chisel. If you want high-quality die photos, you'll need a metallurgical microscope, which shines the light down through the lens. I got my microscope on eBay. Once you have a bunch of die photos, you can stitch them together with a program such as Hugin.
Scanning just uses a microscope and open source panorama stitching software: http://www.righto.com/2015/12/creating-high-resolution-integ...

Home decapping is possible, from what I can tell, but uses methods like “fuming nitric acid” and “blowtorch”, neither of which I would really want to experiment with right now.

resilicon.reddit.com is becoming fairly active, if you have an interest.