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Comment by eebynight | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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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...

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.

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.

The blue highlighted circular structures I believe are rf inductors.

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

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