Some people asked for some of those older Atmel parts after seeing the MEGA88 and ATMEGA169 teardowns.
Here’s a quick one on the AT90S8515. It’s still very popular even though it’s been replaced by the MEGA8515. It’s built on a larger process and it’s not planarized (.50um and below are planarized but you may find some .50um non-planarized)
8KB Flash, 512 Byte SRAM, 512 Byte EEPROM with 32 working registers. That’s sooo nice! 4x faster than the typical PIC.
There was a mistake in the above picture too when we highlighted the areas! We forgot to outline the EEPROM area.
The side of the array is touching the ’8′ in 8KB EEPROM above and it runs vertical along-side the FLASH. So in theory there are two 8 bit FLAH arrays and a single 8 bit EEPROM area all running veritical in the “8KB Flash” highlighted area.
Do you see it? Give us your feedback!
That is a nice picture! Have you studied the remaining logic in any detail on this chip? Obviously the CPU core must be close to the register file, but it is not obvious how large the core itself is from the chip photo. (Although one could hazard a guess from looking at the density of the routing, it is much more dense just above the register file…
Auto-routing
Most of the core is in the logic area to the left of the Flash upto about the end of our box around the flash.
It is the most dense area of the entire chip.
what can be the circuit on the upper border off the die ??
Without spending time on this, it is most likely peripherals, flash downloader for parallel, serial programming and things like that.
Some of it may still be part of the main core too.
no , i mean in the middle of the cutted upper edge of the die , not really connected to the rest of the circuit .
It appears to be some kind of test circuitry present on the wafer during manufactuer. There are 2 test pads placed. The remainder of this area can be seen at the bottom of the die and if you compare multiple dice, you should be able to see more areas of that circuit.
No actual connections to the die are present afawk.
at 58808 can anyone tell me the part number of this processor or put the expertaise.
Some Atmel AVR Smartcard variant (e.g. AT90SC6464, AT90SC7272, …) most likely.
Thank you. Sorry for off-topic but I am beginner in chip analisys during last days I’ve find video on wired how to read chip from chris tarnovsky and I just wondering could you write some more info about that. Maybe secend part ?Belive me or not but is extremely hard to find some more info, some proper info. Don’t have to be video just the normal topic with pictures and text.