Winner, Name that Ware May 2019

The Ware for May 2019 is a contact image sensor from an HP multifunction print/scanner. Congrats to jackw01 for nailing this one, email me for your prize! The array of tall, thin rectangles along the bottom of the die is the actual image sensing elements, and the circuitry immediately above it is fully covered with a metal shield to prevent misdirected incident light from affecting its operation.

Below is a slightly larger contextual image of the die, which clearly shows its unusual (long and thin) aspect ratio.

In addition to about a dozen of these image sensors, the same board is paired with a couple of other wirebonded chips. One is a pretty run-of-the-mill looking driver or deserializer chip, and the other is some TI chip codenamed “Dasher” which features a mesh structure in its top metal layer. The mesh looks similar to an anti-tamper mesh, so I’m guessing there is some magic inside that HP was looking to protect from would-be cloners. I thought about making the die shots below the feature for last month’s Name That Ware, but decided it would be a bit too hard to guess, as googling for SN67013 returns quite a red herring, a speech controller chip by an unrelated company.

One Response to “Winner, Name that Ware May 2019”

  1. willmore says:

    Are you sure that ‘mesh’ isn’t just a signal or power layer that’s aliasing with the lower resolution of the imaging sensor that captured the image? That looks like a synthasized chip, so you’d expect global routing/power layers like that.