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Can someone point out where are the laser trimmed resistors in the photos, and maybe explain some more of the components?


The trimmed resistors are the four brown rectangles with notches (one is shown in atomlib's pic).

The silvery surfaces are aluminum - seems a single layer of metal process. Some large plates may be capacitors.

In analog circuits, MOS transistors are often fairly big, to carry larger currents, sometimes in the tens or hundreds of milliamps. There are a few such large devices, where you can see an interdigitated structure: think two hands open flat with the fingers interpenetrating but not touching. One hand is the MOS source terminal, the other is the drain terminal, the space between is the gate that controls current flow in the channel between the two first terminals.

(Layout diagram picture: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~butts/icons/ex2.gif - blue is metal drain and source, red is poly gate, green squares are contacts to silicon below.)


If you're interested in this sort of thing, there is a great class at RPI which has its lecture slides available:

http://security.cs.rpi.edu/courses/hwre-spring2014/

The slides for lecture 4 (http://security.cs.rpi.edu/courses/hwre-spring2014/Lecture4_...) shows what various types of components (such as laser-trimmed resistors) look like on a die.


I am and this looks awesome. Thank you!


Here is image Mikhail Svarichevsky (author of that blog post) posted as answer to this question in comments on Habrahabr http://i.imgur.com/vC5VkH0.jpg


Here: http://i.imgur.com/Fk5f69k.jpg

You can see the laser has cut the resistive material, increasing the resistance.




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