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Boffins turns landfill WinPhones into microscopes

mad physicist Fiona

Although a cheap microscope device like this might be quite useful for anyone who wants to get into analysing de-capped chips on a tight budget - that is to say, burning the top off of an IC with acid to physically look inside and read out firmware, etc...

Not really, given that feature sizes on ICs have been under the wavelength of visible light for more than twenty years now. That means that you can't see the features with any optical instrument even in theory, yet alone with a low end device such as this. Reverse engineering of ICs has always been a job for electron microscopy.

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