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I took the metal lid off the chip to improve the scan quality. If I had left the chip intact, it would probably be fine. (I assume the X-ray levels are low enough to avoid damage, but I haven't confirmed that.)

johnklos•49m ago

This isn't about CT scanning, but about the chip itself.

Since the bond wires are just hanging out in air, does this mean that a chip like this could be ruined by dropping it which might cause the bond wires to move enough to short something?

Thanks for all your hard work!

imoverclocked•48m ago

Does it look like the almost connected pins could have been purposely severed during production? ie: could they have been connected and then using a calculated pulse of power, disconnected?

kens•5m ago

If they installed wire bonds and removed them, there would be visible remnants on the die, which aren't there.

Mountain_Skies•1h ago

> From the circuitry on the die, this pin appears to be an output. If someone with a 386 chip hooks this pin to an oscilloscope, maybe they will see something interesting.

Would be a fun surprise if the 386 had its own Halt and Catch Fire mode.

mrlonglong•1h ago

Where's A0 and A1?

kens•58m ago

Since the 386 is a 32-bit processor, the address specifies a 32-bit word and doesn't use address bits A0 and A1. But what if you just want to read a byte or a 16-bit word? The trick is that the 386 provides four Byte Enable outputs (BE0#-BE3#) that indicates which bytes in the word are being transferred. Of course, it's not that simple. If the lower 16 bits of the data bus aren't being used, the upper 16 bits of the data bus are duplicated on the lower 16 bits to make 16-bit buses more efficient (somehow).

mrlonglong•37m ago

Neat, saves two wires.