Transcript
Low-quality photo of a cleanly decapped chip with no resin around it, lying in a recessed rectangle in black plastic or ceramic. It is protected with some clear coat, and there are gold bond wires connecting it with 14 pins embedded in the package material. Two of them on opposing sides are connected and form a bed that the die.A structured square takes up most of the left half of the die and appears significantly darker. The rest is usual chip design with minor rectangular structures. The second photo uses crappy dusty lenses instead of digital zoom. It is slightly less cropped so it is revealed that the entire thing is within a deeper recess, possibly with a tab that keeps a cover on?
I don’t have a camera better than my phone, sorry, and the magnifying glasses did not really help.
The pics are purposefully cropped to make the guessing a little harder. The chip continues to work now that I’ve undone this.
You may ask follow-up questions. I will post the full story and pics once you guess correctly.
Please use the spoiler syntax for your guesses so that people can enjoy guessing with follow-up hints without spoilers! You really don’t like doing this, apparently. I thought it would make it more fun for people to take a guess even after someone guesses correctly.
I will do the same with any hints and answers I post in the comments so that everyone can choose the difficulty.
Ah…
try 2
optical mouse sensor? might have the right pin count if it’s the primary ic
If I’m wrong, I’m out of ideas, my house is far from a normal house, so my reference points are wrong.
Congratulations!
Thanks for using the spoiler tag. It’s working now.
And yes, I took into account that electronic nerds’ houses are different from most others.
The story
My Genius optical mouse was tracking poorly, even on patterned surfaces and mouse mats. I cleaned the lens and that didn’t help. So I used a knife to open the chip, which is a pinhole camera with a die that integrates the sensor, a basic image processing system, button, wheel and LED controller and a USB (or maybe also PS/2) interface. I cleaned the chip with alcohol (mainly to remove the dust that had landed on it while it was open) and reassembled the mouse to find that it made no effect on ots functionality. I ultimately found out that the focus distance was off and I fixed it by removing the rubber pads at the bottom.
The chip appears to have no alphanumerical marking.
Full picture of the PCB with this chip – it is slightly damaged because I needed to scrape off parts of it to allow the cover to come off; I also did this because I thought of readjusting the focus by slightly lowering the chip (by bending its legs).