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Update: the bill of materials is now available. You can order boards from OSH Park using this direct link. Last time I ordered, it cost me a grand total of $3.55 for three boards (free shipping), and it took about two weeks for the boards to arrive.

I screwed up. My bench power supply is a Lambda LPT-7202-FM triple output (0-7V @ 5A, 0-20V @ 1.5A, 0-20V @ 1.5A), and I blew it up by trying to desulfate a lead-acid battery. The idea is to take a dead lead-acid battery and recondition it by charging it with a current-limited 15V source while feeding it high voltage pulses. I had a diode connected in between the battery and the bench supply to protect the power supply from the high voltage pulses. Well, the diode failed. It was a sad day.

Fortunately the service manual for the supply is available online. I traced around the circuit and found that two of the power control chips were fried, but everything else seemed OK–I could move the one remaining functional chip from channel to channel to confirm that. The control chips were marked with the Motorola logo and a Lambda house part number: FBT-031. A forum thread indicated that the part was actually the MC1466. Sadly this chip is long out of production and a bit hard to find, although a popular auction site had several listed from a seller in China (but who knows if the parts were counterfeit or not).

The datasheet has the full schematic including resistor values, but how do I know that it actually matches the chip? Since the IC is packaged in a ceramic DIP, I followed reader Uwe’s suggestion and took a chisel to one of the dead parts.

It worked and nothing was damaged! The die looks like this:

I went over the layout and it matches up with the datasheet schematic. Those funny round elements are actually zener diodes. You can see the long skinny resistors and the lateral PNPs as well as the NPN transistors and diodes. Below is the schematic (click to enlarge):

The IC design is pretty archaic. I’d say it dates to the late 1960s. There are fairly ordinary differential amplifiers, but the current mirrors are really strange, and the voltage reference circuit uses Zener diodes and series-connected diodes instead of a temperature compensated bandgap reference. The two Zener diodes (the only round features on the die) are probably just reverse biased NPN transistors, using the ~7.5V avalanche breakdown of the base-emitter junction. The lateral PNPs have a much higher breakdown voltage so they can’t be used this way.

Here’s a labeled die photo (click for a larger image) so you can see where each of the components are. The component designators match up with my schematic, not the IC datasheet schematic.

The device is simple enough that I decided to build a really small PC board with discrete components. I found that the BC847BVN (NPN/PNP dual transistor), BC847BV (dual NPN), and BAS16VV (triple diode) came in a really tiny SOT-563 package. Believe it or not, this is not the tightest or smallest layout I’ve done. This is a 2-layer board with 6 mil traces and 6 mil spaces.

To give you an idea just how small the SOT-563 is, take a look at the first BC847BVN I soldered:

The part is 1.05mm x 1.05mm! I had to use a very fine soldering iron tip and a microscope. Another trick is to use really thin solder (I used 0.38mm). As you can see, the resulting board is just slightly larger than the original DIP IC:

It really is pin compatible. I plugged two of them into my Lambda supply and now it works perfectly!

Since 2014 is generally considered the 50th anniversary of TTL logic, I thought I’d take a TTL logic chip apart and do a little analysis.

So I started with a DM7438N, lot code M:P9006Y. Looking at National Semiconductor’s device marking convention document, I take this to mean that it was manufactured in week 6 of 1990 at a subcontractor’s fab in the United States and assembled in Malaysia.

The 7438 is a quad 2-input NAND buffer with open-collector outputs. That means the die should look symmetrical to a degree.

To take it apart, I used a rotary tool to carve out the encapsulation material on the top and the bottom, and then picked at it with side cutters until the chip fell out. Sadly I cracked off a corner of the die including one bond pad, but it’s still possible to figure out how it works.

What does all this do? See the image below. I’ve cropped all but one gate and highlighted the various semiconducting regions in different colors. I’ve also given designators to all the components.

Red represents the N-type collector epitaxial diffusion. Cyan represents the P-type base diffusion, and purple represents the N+ emitter region.

The schematic looks like this:

That dual-emitter transistor (Q1) sure looks strange!

How does it work? Well, if both A and B inputs are a logic high, then Q1 is off, but some current flows from R1 (4K ohm) through the base collector junction (since it is, after all, a PN junction) and feeds the base of Q2. Q2 turns on, and its emitter current feeds R3 (1K ohm) and Q3. Q3 turns on as well, and the output Y gets driven low. The non-inverted version of the output signal is available at the collector of Q3 (biased through R2, a 1.6K ohm resistor), but this particular chip doesn’t use it.

If either A or B goes low, then Q1 gets turned on. Current flows through the base emitter junction and the base gets pulled to about 0.6V above ground. No current flows through the base of Q2 because the voltage on the collector of Q1 is just too low for any current to flow. Q3 therefore stays off, and the output Y goes high impedance. By the way, this is what open collector means–the collector of the output stage transistor is left “open” with no corresponding transistor above it to pull it high.

Diodes D1 and D2 are just for input protection.

There are a couple of unused components. There is a resistor right below R1, and another resistor below R2. There are two extra transistors with a shared collector to the left of Q3. A different top metal mask could connect these extra components into the circuit and change the function of the device.

Can you think of some other gates that could be built by changing the top metal mask? Remember that there is only one metal layer which limits where you can route the traces.