The Ware for December 2011 brings us from 1945 back to the modern day:
Happy holidays!
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 10th, 2011 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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a semiconductor made of germanium, possibly a transistor or a diode
Looks like solid state laser from Blu-ray drive.
I would guess a LED.
Photo-scr. Or photo darlington, but given the more complex srtucture i’d guess scr
Lasers are usually rectangular, and you would only need 2 connectors (bottom is one), and it appears to have a base, middle, and top.
It may not be ‘photo’ at all, but an old opened can.
Sorry, if it’s a Nichia, it’s more likely one from the NDHV series
Other candidates are :
Sanyo DL3146/DL5146
Panasonic LNC416
Sony : http://www.sony.net/Products/SC-HP/pro/laser_diode/index.html
1945! So its earlier than the first transistor. I’ll guess its one of the first LEDs. Silicon Carbide perhaps ?
For the people with a reading challenge: This ware is NOT from 1945. The old one was. This one is “from the modern day”.
My guess: Not so sure it’s a laser diode! The substrate the smaller chip is mounted on doesn’t strike me as terribly thermally conductive, which is a bad idea in LD applications.
I’d rather think it’s a fancy photodiode. Maybe something fast, too.
It’s typical double heterostructure laser diode.
i would guess it’s a ye oldie replica of a field effect transistor made (modern day) in a test lab somewhere…
it looks like we are supposed to see that the square is transparent. a crystal oscillator? an experimental rig to test the dialectric properties of the crystal?
could be a fancy low-kelvin thermometer with the black material as a thermal dampener.
VCSEL, maybe from a chip-scale atomic clock?
the coarse grained structure of the cross section reminded me the germanium, since silicon is more “glassy” when cut…
but wait… looking back at the first photo, I now recognize the metallic half-cylinder on which the main die is connected. I already saw that in salvaged laser diodes.
so: this is a burnt/destroyed laser diode. I can’t guess the color (because nearly all diodes have the same packaging) neither why it was broken.
The grained surface is one end of the laser cavity’s, by which the laser light normally exits the semiconductor diode. it was burnt because of a too high current and started to melt, giving this grainy look.
The small cube “glued” on the top of the main die is a power control photodiode, to monitor the intensity of the laser light emitted by the main diode. This is used as a feedback to control the current in the diode.
Here is another duide closeup. This one is bigger than bunnie’s one:
http://i690.photobucket.com/albums/vv263/Eudaimonium/Macro/closeup_nl2.jpg
Here we have one that looks like bunnie’s one:
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2436/5734479887_655ff43fed.jpg
73
Some of the other comments seem very plausible so i’ll go a different direction :)
It appears that there is a thin film or coating on the outside of the curvature. There is also separation between the component and the two wires coming out so… could this be a magnetic read head? Possibly something like a single track of a mag strip or for something like a DAT or cassette media?
My bet is that it’s a two dimensional laser diode, shiny black composite is graphite which reduces the junction temperature as it has better spread of the generated heat resulting in higher power diodes using this insulation.
The layer behind the graphite is a metal heat spreader which interfaces graphite layer. Graphite heat spreader is necessary because of the small area of the photon producing dissimilar semiconductor junctions.
It´s a semiconductor laser, red?, infrared?, blue?, point laser probably.
Strain gauge based on piezo resistive effect? Should that date be 1954?