- How to reverse engineer an analog chip: the TDA7000 FM radio receiver (righto.com)
Have you ever wanted to reverse engineer an analog chip from a die photo? Wanted to understand what’s inside the “black box” of an integrated circuit? In this article, I explain my reverse engineering process, using the Philips TDA7000 FM radio receiver chip as an example. This chip was the first FM radio receiver on a chip.1 It was designed in 1977—an era of large transistors and a single layer of metal—so it is much easier to examine than modern chips. Nonetheless, the TDA7000 is a non-trivial chip with over 100 transistors. It includes common analog circuits such as differential amplifiers and current mirrors, along with more obscure circuits such as Gilbert cell mixers.
- Messier 92 (Wikipedia)
Messier 92 (also known as M92, M 92, or NGC 6341) is a globular cluster of stars in the northern constellation of Hercules.