little distraction during PCB assembly: WLCSP audio codec looked cool so I had to stop and get some microscope photos
| Github | https://github.com/miek |
@miek
- 754 Followers
- 269 Following
- 353 Posts
Hardware hacker. Mostly posting about electronics, radio, and reverse engineering. Engineer at @GreatScottGadgets working on tools for USB, SDR, and more. he/him
In the wide shot of it, it looks like there were some other designs on the wafer that were sliced through to cut this one out. (or maybe just test patterns?)
Here's a die shot of an RF MOSFET I fried. It's supposedly a Motorola RD01MUS1 (but could be a clone/fake).
I don't have (or want!) the chemicals to de-cap it properly so I tried the method of overheating the package & cracking it apart with pliers to pop out the die. Aside from a bit of epoxy still stuck to it, it worked out pretty well!
Doing some high-power measurements of RF limiter circuits, it ended up needing a fair bit of RF plumbing 😅
Hooked it all up to test and it kinda works!! Feeding in 10.01 GHz to RF and 5 GHz LO. RF - 2xLO mixes down to about 10 MHz shown on the spec-an.
About 25 dB conversion loss 😅 but there's probably some performance left on the table once I do any impedance matching (and, you know, maybe not use copper tape on some random copper-clad).
