Ken Shirriff's blog

Computer history, restoring vintage computers, IC reverse engineering, and whatever

Showing posts with label electronics. Show all posts

Showing posts with label electronics. Show all posts

Superbeta transistors inside: Die photos and analysis of the LM108 op amp

The LM108 op amp is an interesting chip to examine under a microscope because it uses special superbeta transistors for high performance....

Inside a RFID race timing chip: die photos of the Monza R6

I recently watched a cross-country running race that used a digital timing system, so I investigated how the RFID timing chip works. Ea...

Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 10: New boards, running programs, mouse problems

Last week our vintage Alto was crashing; we traced the problem to an incompatibility between two of the processor boards. Today we repla...

Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 9: tracing a crash through software and hardware

Last week, after months of restoration, we finally got the vintage Xerox Alto computer to boot ( details ) and run programs. However, so...

Sonicare toothbrush teardown: microcontroller, H bridge, and inductive charging

My Sonicare electric toothbrush recently quit working, so I took it apart and examined the interesting circuitry inside. There's much ...

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