[HN Gopher] Reverse Engineering a Soviet CMOS Chip
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Reverse Engineering a Soviet CMOS Chip
Author : klelatti
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-01-29 10:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| tknot wrote:
| And the article in question
|
| http://www.righto.com/2024/01/reverse-engineering-cmos.html
| rwmj wrote:
| This should be the main link. Since nitter went away twitter is
| unusable.
| leotravis10 wrote:
| I hope the mods fix that since the blog post is more
| important.
| oleg_antonyan wrote:
| This brings my memories from childhood: I've built digital clock
| using this K561IE11 (or K176 - these series were pin to pin
| compatible), and few other counters, decipherers, 32k quartz and
| 7-segment led displays
| dekhn wrote:
| I'm curious what the electronics scene was like in your
| context- I assume you were in USSR, probably russia? Is this
| stuff you could just mail order, was it hard to get, super
| expensive, etc?
| obscurette wrote:
| I lived in USSR, but not in Russia but in Baltics 30 years of
| my life. In Soviet Union you couldn't mail order any stuff.
| In planned economy you supposed to depend on local shops. In
| practice it meant that it was really important where you
| lived and who you knew. The shops a la Radio Shack existed,
| but these were relatively rare and were mostly full of stuff
| nobody really wanted or couldn't buy. Things were really
| different if you lived near some big factory/lab dealing with
| electronics and knew someone who worked in there. Stealing in
| these places was very common, even normal. Thing could be
| prohibitively expensive though, especially if you were
| teenager.
| dekhn wrote:
| thanks. That's pretty consistent with what I've heard. And
| yet, parts of USSR seemed to have very effective
| electronics so I assume there had to be some culture
| promoting EE.
| oleg_antonyan wrote:
| EE promotion was a thing via local clubs for kids (aka
| future workforce to build missiles). But the choice of
| components those clubs had was limited, so if you find a
| schemtics for some cool device in "Radio" magazine
| chances are you won't be able to find all components for
| it in such club. This sometimes was even mentioned in the
| article itslef - like you need this transistor which is
| not available to general public, but "we all know where
| to get it ;)"
| obscurette wrote:
| "Radio" magazine was a constant source of frustration for
| me as a kid. I was never able to build interesting stuff
| from there. There was no radio club in the small town
| where I grew up and the only source of components for me
| was a small shop in the bigger neighbor town. But this
| shop had only components mostly for vacuum tubes TV-s and
| probably unlimited quantity of KT315 and KT361
| transistors.
|
| My world changed completely in the end of high school
| when I was introduced to local radio amateur. We visited
| this very same shop together and I found out that they
| had a lot of more interesting stuff available in back
| room :).
| oleg_antonyan wrote:
| Russia 90-2000. Few common spots to find electronic
| components were:
|
| 1) dumpsters - literally, after school we went on a hunt for
| thrown away TVs and other stuff. Especailly near factories.
| We knew some common spots to loot and visited them
| periodically. Many of those logic/gates/counters ICs I had
| came from one junkyard near the industrial zone - they used
| to "respawn" in a form of pcbs from old mainframes or
| something like that (pcbs were varnished and removeing ics
| was huge pain in a butt)
|
| 2) TV repair shops. They usually had some stuff they don't
| need and with enough persistence (aka soft skills) we as kids
| were able to get some goodies, along with books and advice.
|
| 3) Absolute treasure - someone working at a factory that is
| miraculously not closed yet - getting aka stealing stuff for
| them was easy. Stealing stuff from school and other places we
| could gain access to was also a thing - they often had a lot
| of old crap sitting in basement, like record players,
| amplifiers.
|
| 4) Radio markets and shops. These were often out of reach for
| kids especially in that period, but sometimes we were able to
| save enough money for something that can be purchased but not
| found elsewhere. The choice was also very limitted, but I
| found few ex-engineers selling a lot of goodies stolen during
| their employment - selling these was ofter the only way to
| survive, but again with enough "soft skills" we were able to
| "loot" them for free.
|
| 5) In soviet era there were a lot of clubs for
| kids/teenagers, even in small towns you could find a club
| with teacher where everyone can come and learn how to build
| some electronic stuff. Those usually had access to element
| base. During 90s most of them have closed, those who survived
| were barely afloat in this new world. I personally never had
| a good experience with those, but know that someone did, so
| getting goodies there was also a possibility.
| catherinecodes wrote:
| So glad to see this here. Ken Shirriff's work is really
| fascinating.
| kens wrote:
| Author here for any questions...
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(page generated 2024-01-30 23:02 UTC)