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Cringed at the wooden block, older ICs like that are a lot more sensitive to ESD damage than modern ones, he should have covered that end of the wooden block with foil.

Cool that someone has found a working 6502 from the first batches though! I wonder how many are left out there...

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You sure about that? Maybe 6502's are old enough before proper ESD protection circuitry became mainstream, but generally smaller nodes are a lot more sensitive to ESD damage than the ancient stuff since the size of features back then just was so much bigger.

There's a reason why HBM ESD limits have gone down over time... just because it's physically impossible to protect against a certain level of ESD when you're running ultra high speed circuits.

That's a good point, I think I'd just heard that a long time ago and not really thought about it but with much larger features it should actually be more resilient.

The original 6502 was also built on an NMOS process, not CMOS. It's CMOS which tends to be more static-sensitive, especially early CMOS.

I'm not sure where CBM/MOS's HMOS process (used for -- IIRC -- the SID and VIC) fits in.

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