Along with his great investigations into the MOS 6502, its variations, and other MOS and Commodore tech, Michael Steil has donated many Commodore parts and boards, among them a Commodore 8580 SID. This is a later version of the famous MOS 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID). Read about the 6581 and 8580 on Wikipedia
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The die shot is stitched from many separate microscope shots from a Nikon LV150 with an LU Plan Fluor 20x objective. The images were corrected and stitched automatically by Christian Sattler in the UK, using Autopano-sift-C and custom code. The map of stitched images is shown on the right.
The chip was depackaged to reveal the silicon die in the last week of January, 2011, and the final surface image was produced February 1, 2011. After stripping back the metal and polysilicon layers and modeling the chip, our data will surely lead to good things. The chip will be a challenge to simulate given its mixed analog and digital design, but our method of building accurate polygon models of the components should give us a great start at reproducing an authentic SID sound. We've also teamed up with Tommi Lempinen who has done great work on the 6581, available on his site.
If you find these images or our work useful or inspiring, please consider a donation to further our work (links on the left nav bar). Labs charge $50 to $75 to depackage a single chip, and several hundred dollars more for high resolution photography and de-layering, the results of which we're making freely available through this site. Your support is a valuable contribution to computer history and to preserving and presenting classic computer technology in the public domain.