AMD 8085 die shot and first layer images

You thought Intel was behind the 8085, so why in the world would we list an "AMD 8085?"  Back in the day, computer manufacturers would insist on having several independent producers of a chip to guarantee supply.  AMD was a second source producer of the 8085, having licensed the design from Intel.  Can you imagine an AMD or NVIDIA Core i7 today?  Things aint what they used to be.

Pavel Zima has done a great job extracting components into per-layer images.  So far, we have only metal and vias, as we'll need to delayer the chip before we can see details under the metal.

CTIA Die Shot

Here's our latest die shot:  the Atari C012295 CTIA.

We've had a die shot of the follow-on C014805 GTIA for a while, and can now compare the two nearly identical chips to find out what was improved and fixed in moving from the CTIA to the GTIA.

250,000 unique visitors - Happy New Year!

Happy New Year Everyone!
I'm happy to report that Visual6502.org has now had over a quarter of a million unique visitors!  The site has served just over 2 TB of die shot imagery and simulation data in its 15 months on the web.  We've been quiet lately, but behind the scenes there's an ever-growing buzz of activity thanks to several new folks studying chips and contributing polygons.  Their work is trickling out on our wiki, various other websites (which we really need to summarize and link to.  Check the wiki!), and in some retro computing forums.  In the New Year, we have a few fun appearances in the media lined up, and we hope to tell you a bit more about our part in two very exciting collaborations.
We expect to have new decaps and die shots in a month or so (our lab wizard is focused on his first kid, born just after Thanksgiving!), and we'll be gradually working our way through the inventory of over 200 chips sent in by donors.  Thank you donors!  We've decapped over 100 of these so far, though the die shots and de-layering (a very delicate process) will take quite a while longer to complete.
It's looking to be a great year!

Shots of a famous speech synthesis chip.  See the die shot page for links to a programming guide and chip data sheets

Zilog CMOS Z80 - Z84C00

CMOS version of the Zilog Z80.  One of our few chips with more than a single layer of metal.

Biggest: 80286, Smallest: UC3843P

Our largest die shot to date:  23253 x 22924 pixels, 848 MB, stitched from 455 separate 1600x1200 images.  The Intel 80286

 And our smallest chip, a Texas Instruments UC3843P

And finally, an AMD 2901 4-bit ALU

Texas Instruments TMS1000NLL Die Shots

June and July have been very busy for us, but not busy at the acid bench or microscope.  Now we're back in the lab and getting down to business, knocking a few chips off the top of the amazing pile of historic devices we've received from donors lately.  Here's a very early microcontroller from TI.

Keep an eye on our Chip Status List.