The Ware for May 2026 is shown below.
This month’s ware is on a theme similar to last month’s but about…50 years older. Lots of things change over the years, but the geometric organization of an array never goes out of style. On the other hand, I increasingly miss things that were designed for repair, containing self-documenting features like this one.
Huge thanks again to FETguy and Renew Computers in San Rafael, CA for contributing this gem!
Seems like I overestimated people’s interest in looking at silicon images! Congrats to k8 for attempting the challenge, I appreciate the participation. email me for your prize!
Recall that the list of possible memory dimensions is limited to a list of 28 possible types of memories. Given that, here’s the mapping of macros to memory types:
In addition to naming the winner and the solution, stay tuned for a follow-up post walking through how to read the macros, and why I thought it would be interesting / important to try.
The Ware for April 2026 is a little bit different. Instead of showing a circuit board, I thought it’d be interesting to go inside the chips themselves and try to identify what’s happening on at the silicon level.
Since chip reading isn’t a widely spread skill, we’ll start with a gentle introduction. For this series of wares, I’ll tell you exactly which chip these images are from: they’re from the Baochip-1x. It’s unique in that at least some of the source code is available – enough of it to give significant hints as to what’s going on. It’s also unique in that it was packaged to explicitly facilitate non-destructive IR imaging, thus allowing us to look at the chip without destroying it.
A good place to start for chip reading is learning how to read RAM macros. So, this month’s ware consists of several RAM macros. The challenge is to guess the total number of bits (given as an X by Y amount) in each example. Each of these RAMs exist inside the Baochip-1x, so that pre-constrains the space of valid guesses. Here’s another hint: it’s typical for all RAM to be wired into a “built in self test” (BIST) system. Such a system would effectively contain a central index of all RAM sizes.
SRAM architecture itself hasn’t changed much over the years. I pulled my copy of “Principles of CMOS VLSI Design” (2nd edition) from 1993 off the bookshelf and checked – at a high level, these macros still reflect exactly what’s taught in that book If you don’t have a copy of that book, there’s some pretty good modern resources on the internet that offer an overview of the basic structure of SRAM macros.
All of the macros show above are at the exact same resolution except for “Macro G” – you’ll need to click on that file to download a version that’s at full size (it’s a 2MiB PNG). Also note that the macros are not “tight cropped” – I left some of the standard cells as context around the macros. Those cells are not part of the competition this month, but I like to leave them in because it helps to have the cells in-frame to get a sense of scale.
These images are courtesy of Fail Sec Labs, and done with a Hamamatsu iPhemos-MP 1.3um LSM. This is a non-destructive infra-red imaging technique similar to IRIS, but done using a very expensive machine equipped with a laser and precision mechano-optics, and thus capable of achieving a higher resolution than IRIS. A homebrew IRIS is able to resolve many of the details visible in these images, but not with the clarity and contrast of the iPhemos-MP system. Also note that the images presented here are picked from the raw, unstitched data, and hand-stitched to reduce artifacts.
If you’d like to compare and contrast the various techniques, here’s the full-chip image files taken by various systems for download:
Note that images that lack the part markings are taken on a version of the chip that was specially prepared without any top markings.
The Ware for March 2026 is a Elecom DST C30SV 6 in 1 USB “docking station”. I’ll give the prize to tayken – the ware itself wasn’t terribly hard to guess on its own, so this month I’m just going with the first interesting response. Congrats, email me for your prize!
As other readers commented, the device has a lot of similarity to other products in this class. I’m guessing there is a common board design that OEMs use to make variants of the product.
Here’s additional context of the ware, for completeness!
This one claimed to have “PD” capability, such that one of the USB-C ports could be used to deliver power to your system, up to 100 watts, thus freeing up a port for data use that would normally be used for power. This turned out not to be the case – the device suffered a quick and catastrophic failure of some sort which didn’t leave any visibly burned out components but left it in an “unreliable” state – it could enumerate, but would quickly reset itself and shut down. The second device I got of this type, from a different manufacturer, suffered a similar fate, except it at least continued to operate with its peripheral functions minus a USB type C port. I’ve more or less given up on trying to go that route – my guess is most laptops do not, in practice, draw more than about 40-50 watts, so perhaps manufacturers can get away with claiming 100 watts but “only in theory”. My laptop will continuously draw close to the full 100 watts from any supply that claims to deliver it, especially when I’m doing CAD tasks that exercise the GPU and CPU for hours on end, or if I’m simultaneously charging the battery and using the laptop.
The Ware for March 2026 is below:
This ware malfunctioned, so I took it apart to see what’s going on and now it’s this month’s Name that Ware. As it would be far too easy to guess if I showed the whole circuit board, this is just a portion of the whole ware. I suspect the nature of the ware will be easy to figure out, but would be impressed if anyone can determine the exact make & model, since these are likely OEM’d by a handful of factories and the same core design is shared among a wide family of devices.
As a mostly unrelated side-rant, one side effect of the transition to USB-C that I’ve noticed is that power ratings just aren’t what they used to be. If a power supply said 100 watts on the label, it used to mean 100 watts continuous over a full consumer temperature range. Now, somehow, it seems to have become normalized that it’s 100 watts “briefly”, and maybe two thirds of that continuously on a good day. This is a problem if you use your laptop to do board layout (stressing the discrete GPU) while compiling large Rust programs in the background (stressing the CPU) for hours at a time, while also trying to charge your battery after a long flight. Then again, a 90% efficient regulator at 100 watts is dissipating roughly 10 watts of heat – as much as a small soldering iron – so maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked by this outcome.
