[vcf-midatlantic] X-ray erasure of EPROMs, was Re: Getting Data off old Atari Floppies

[Jonathan Gevaryahu]

On 12/14/2015 7:43 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
> On 12/14/2015 07:41 PM, Mike Loewen via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
>>>> Yeah 300F was completely wrong, I was mixing baking floppies up with
>>>> baking EPROMS after x-ray (not UV!) based erasure (which really does
>>>> need 300F).
>>>   Can you tell me more about this?  Does baking somehow address the
>>> problem of surface state creation during X-ray erasure?
>>>
>>>   (I type this with a glance at a stack of trays containing several
>>> thousand non-windowed EPROM-based microcontrollers, and another glance
>>> over at my X-ray machine..)
>>     You forgot to mention your electron microscope.
>    Can an electron beam erase EPROMs nondestructively??
>
>               -Dave
>
I know a UV laser can, but you need to live-decap (i.e. decap without 
damaging the die or bond wires) the chip first. This is used by security 
researchers to unset security bits etc on microcontrollers.

-- 
Jonathan Gevaryahu
jgevaryahu at gmail.com
jgevaryahu at hotmail.com