Powers of 10: doxxed!
Posted: Thu May 25, 2023 5:43 pm
This series examines a small chip from National Semiconductor, a LM3402, fabricated in 2004. I tried a few new techniques with this series. Here's the 1:1 reproduction:
The chip is barely visible. One new thing I tried is the mounting method- taking a cue from the diatomists, I glued the chip to a coverslip with nail polish rather than mount it to the slide. This helps ensure the face of the chip is flat and perpendicular to the optical axis of the microscope. My first attempt was a little messy, but it worked well, so thanks, guys!
The trade-off is that most of my (Zeiss) objectives can't be used as they are designed to be used w/o a coverslip. So, the other new thing was to try and get reasonable images using Nikon and Olympus objectives on my Zeiss microscope. I did notice a decrease in overall contrast due to the coverslip, but I can live with it.
Here's the next image using an Olympus SPlan 4x/0.16 objective: And then using a Nikon 20x/0.75 Fluar: If you look closely, there a small line of text beneath the yellow squares, and that's what I am going to keep magnifying.
And then using an Olympus SPlan 40X/0.95 w/ correction collar: Huh... it's a name! Let's zoom in a bit more, using the Leica 100X/1.47 lens:
This is a real person, raising interesting questions about privacy- I blocked out the last name because this is a public forum.... When I found this, I did an online search for the person, and he is still alive and living in the US. I believe he is retired. I haven't tried to contact him and wonder if I should.
Does he wonder if anyone discovered this? Was he in fact responsible for putting his own name on the design? Who else knew about this? So many questions!
The chip is barely visible. One new thing I tried is the mounting method- taking a cue from the diatomists, I glued the chip to a coverslip with nail polish rather than mount it to the slide. This helps ensure the face of the chip is flat and perpendicular to the optical axis of the microscope. My first attempt was a little messy, but it worked well, so thanks, guys!
The trade-off is that most of my (Zeiss) objectives can't be used as they are designed to be used w/o a coverslip. So, the other new thing was to try and get reasonable images using Nikon and Olympus objectives on my Zeiss microscope. I did notice a decrease in overall contrast due to the coverslip, but I can live with it.
Here's the next image using an Olympus SPlan 4x/0.16 objective: And then using a Nikon 20x/0.75 Fluar: If you look closely, there a small line of text beneath the yellow squares, and that's what I am going to keep magnifying.
And then using an Olympus SPlan 40X/0.95 w/ correction collar: Huh... it's a name! Let's zoom in a bit more, using the Leica 100X/1.47 lens:
This is a real person, raising interesting questions about privacy- I blocked out the last name because this is a public forum.... When I found this, I did an online search for the person, and he is still alive and living in the US. I believe he is retired. I haven't tried to contact him and wonder if I should.
Does he wonder if anyone discovered this? Was he in fact responsible for putting his own name on the design? Who else knew about this? So many questions!