Die Shots of as Many Cpus and Other Interesting Chips as Possible

On the less serious side I like EvilmonkeyzDesignz youtube shorts.

They generally looks for the doodles on older chips, but also looks at MEMs devices as well: https://www.youtube.com/@EvilmonkeyzDesignz

They would definitely be able to add to the list (they have a video of 100 chips for their 100k subscriber mark).

Branch Education makes good videos.

Outstanding video, thank you. No wonder this took months’ worth of research and animation to make.

Never heard of this channel. I was mesmerized by this video, thanks. But I have to get back to Adulting for now.

>That TI PA-7000 FPC looks like chaos

I think it looks very well structured compared to the Soviet KM1801VM2

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Birdman86#/media/Fil...

I was also fixed on PowerPC after noticing how regular the dies were. Cache on the right, then what looks like bank after bank of fairly uniform control logic. It's almost like they decided on a general structure and fit everything into this, rather than letting things organically form as needed.

>> Are there any shots of audio amplifiers?

https://www.righto.com/2020/06/reverse-engineering-and-compa...

https://www.righto.com/2019/02/op-amp-on-moon-reverse-engine...

https://www.righto.com/2018/06/silicon-die-analysis-op-amp-w...

Absolutely not. It's like opening a hood of your car, taking picture of what you see and then try to build replica of the engine based on that.

To capture the individual transistors on a modern CPU, you'd need an image tens of terabytes in size, and it'd have to be captured by an electron microscope, not an optical image. And even that wouldn't let you see all the layers. Some of the very old CPUs, I'm not sure what resolution would be required.

A few early CPUs (famously including the 6502) were fully reverse engineered through "ordinary" die photos, and they even have gate-level simulators now where you can basically see the individual transistors switching: http://www.visual6502.org

I don't know if that's still near feasible for an 8088 or 8086. Anything past that, almost certainly not. Anything modern, absolutely not.

Mostly no. You do not see the lower layers and for anything sub 1um or so the resolution is too poor anyway.

His videos are really fun!

I‘m teaching a course on computer architecture at my university and there are these model processors called MUx (MU0-7) that explain how a CPU works from the ground up. I‘m not aware of any toys (my students keep asking me about that as well), but I wrote an interactive visualizer that illustrates the simplest processor and how data moves through it: https://pascalbormann.de/mu-vis/ Not mobile friendly unfortunately and maybe a bit too advanced for kids, but it could be a starting point. The code is here if you want to build on it: https://github.com/Mortano/mu0-visualization

You can see a simulation of an 6502 CPU running here.

http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/expert.html

Also this person has some simple tutorial on how a toy CPUs work. He even made a simulator so you can make your own using gate logic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZwneRb-zqA&list=PLFt_AvWsXl...

How old is the kid?

When my kids were less than 10 I took them to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA and showed them how all the mechanical computers work. They have some exploded and simplified exhibits that are very visual so kids can get it pretty easy. Especially if they’re the kind of kid that builds with blocks. Games like Turing Tumble are good too. Then you just wave your hands and say chips work like this on the inside, but with electricity instead of gears because it’s faster, smaller, cheaper and uses less energy. But at the end of the day, it’s basically all clockwork. Then they smile and say, “makes sense”. And I leave it at that.

When the kids were teenagers I gave them a more thorough explanation.

If you’re not in the Bay Area then the Computer Museum does have YouTube videos. There are many others as well.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XSkGY6LchJs&pp=ygUbbWVjaGFuaWN...

Some of the later steps may be beyond them, depending on the child's age, but Charles Petzold's wonderful book Code explains how you could set up a processor from logic gates with only a little handwaving.

If they are a little older and interested, NAND 2 Tetris is a good self-paced course.

There is a famous video from Hitachi[^1] showing the Youngs double slit experiment[^2]. You may like it!

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PanqoHa_B6c

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

Imagine someone quietly developing, and then suddenly releasing a modern chip with this kind of design in mind. They’d get a lot of publicity just for being different. And the process would be their own, so if anyone likes it, or there turns out to be any benefits to the design, it would be a while until someone replicates it.

My feeling is that this would make bin packing on a silicon wafer less optimal?