What nm process used for Agnus/Denise/Paula etc?

[NorthWay]

Anyone else remember that aga was to be intergrated into the cpu die?

Somewhere in the back of my head I seem to remember that C= had actually got a licence for 680x0. I remember some passed-on posting from CIX about a new cost-reduced model that never saw the day of light.

[mikej]

If it helps, the Atari ST chips are 3um. I guess the Amiga ones are about the same.
/MikeJ

[Hattig]

Anyone decapped an OCS chipset to see the die sizes and get some sexy images online?

Wikipedia says that an 8500 transistor chip (Z80) on 4um was 18mm^2 (just over 4mm by 4mm. The 8086 was a 3um chip and had 29,000 transistors on a slightly larger die. The 68000 was a 4um chip, but it looks like it had denser logic than the Z80, partially offsetting the extra transistor count (or it doesn't contain 68000 transistors).

[freqmax]

Only the photographic equipment to get the image remains then ..

> 3 µm should be doable.

[FrenchShark]

Only the photographic equipment to get the image remains then ..

> 3 µm should be doable.

Just ask the guys from http://www.visual6502.org.
They are done with the 6502 and 6800 chips. They have the 68000, the VIC-II, the SID, the TIA and others chips as WIP.

Regards,

Frederic

[freqmax]

Have stuff, won't do. Is probably the situation

[biged]

We are making progress, but slowly.  We've got many chips, but there are bottlenecks at deprocessing, at photography and at layout capture.  And sometimes real life intrudes.

I stumbled across this thread some weeks ago which talks about photographic techniques, and links to some good z80 images too.

Cheers
Ed

[NorthWay]

This thread has made me thrawl the net for hours now. Even ordered a book too!

Great stuff. Sometimes I get to think that this internet lark was a good thing.
(Did those A8 chip schematics get posted though?)

[bloodline]

We are making progress, but slowly.  We've got many chips, but there are bottlenecks at deprocessing, at photography and at layout capture.  And sometimes real life intrudes.

I stumbled across this thread some weeks ago which talks about photographic techniques, and links to some good z80 images too.

Cheers
Ed

Hi Ed, I assume you are part of the Visual6502 project? Wonderful idea! I hope you can hurry along the decapping guys as we all want to see the Amiga chips in their full glory... actually imagine a visual sim of the entire Amiga!!!

[biged]

Hi Ed, I assume you are part of the Visual6502 project? Wonderful idea! I hope you can hurry along the decapping guys as we all want to see the Amiga chips in their full glory... actually imagine a visual sim of the entire Amiga!!!

Yes, I'm part of the team. It's become a slightly distributed effort for the polygon capture, but deprocessing and photography is especially skilled work and is still one guy.

Putting together a system simulation is an attractive idea - noting that the clock speed may be a million times slower than reality, so video frames could be an overnight wait - but it's most likely that some eight-bit system or other will appear before the Amiga, and neither will be soon, because of the bottlenecks. (Quietust is doing well with the NES, and Greg had an early demo of a partial 2600 - see page 44 of the pdf)

Die photos of the decapped chip is always the first thing to appear though, and you'll see it on the blog as soon as it happens!  We do have a chipset for an Amiga 500, and will get to it, but we've other promises to keep up first.

(Thanks to everyone who has donated chips!)

Cheers
Ed

[bloodline]

Yes, I'm part of the team. It's become a slightly distributed effort for the polygon capture, but deprocessing and photography is especially skilled work and is still one guy.

Putting together a system simulation is an attractive idea - noting that the clock speed may be a million times slower than reality, so video frames could be an overnight wait - but it's most likely that some eight-bit system or other will appear before the Amiga, and neither will be soon, because of the bottlenecks. (Quietust is doing well with the NES, and Greg had an early demo of a partial 2600 - see page 44 of the pdf)

Die photos of the decapped chip is always the first thing to appear though, and you'll see it on the blog as soon as it happens!  We do have a chipset for an Amiga 500, and will get to it, but we've other promises to keep up first.

(Thanks to everyone who has donated chips!)

Cheers
Ed

I, for one, really can't wait to see those Amiga Chips stripped bare!

I think your work is the best way to preserve the effort that went into designing these computing devices.

[freqmax]

I hope others try the decapping and photographing. Post-processing can be distributed among amiga fans..

[freqmax]

Any decap progress?

How does one interpretate an image like this anyway?

[billt]

Any decap progress?

How does one interpretate an image like this anyway?

Most of what you can see is wires. The little circles or dots on the wires are vias, which connect up a layer or down a layer to continue the wire on a different metal layer. Some of the large blocks may just be large chunks of metal wire. I don't see anything that strikes me as a transistor, but that may be lower stuff covered up by what we can see in the picture. It also helps to be able to turn on/off various layers to focus on different things. A static picture only lets you really see certain things. It helps to have done chip design to read this stuff. If you've done PCB design before you'll understand a lot of it as well.

[Thorham]

Very cool stuff, this Wonder what it would cost to make new Amiga custom chips based on those images once completely reverse engineered.

[Darth_X]

Somewhere in the back of my head I seem to remember that C= had actually got a licence for 680x0. I remember some passed-on posting from CIX about a new cost-reduced model that never saw the day of light.

You want to read this: http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwludwig_en.php