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How to reverse engineer an analog chip: the TDA7000 FM radio receiver
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 integrate...
The nice thing about reverse engineering is that I can assume that the circuit works: the designers needed to consider factors such as the Early effect, capacitance, and beta, but I can ignore them. The Gilbert cell is a bit tricky to understand, 15 but you can think of it as a stack of differential amplifiers, with the current directed along one of four paths, depending on which transistors turn on. In this case, I was answering some questions for the IEEE microchips exhibit, but even when reverse engineering isn't particularly useful, I enjoy discovering the logic behind the mysterious patterns on the die.
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