the Hearth @Felthry@awoo.space

@socks @terrana well, the context is "apple makes things with poor long-term reliability", which isn't really unnusual for them
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@terrana @socks Huh! we've never really looked into those tiny optics very much honestly, not surprised
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@socks @terrana if you're wondering, the thing about microscopes is not actually a joke; objective lenses with magnifications more than about 100x are usually designed to be used with microscope oil, where you put a droplet of oil on the sample before moving the lens into position. the oil provides better coupling to the lens and allows for higher resolving power since the light path doesn't have to go through air (the lens rests only a mm or so from the sample)
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@socks @terrana this is a joke, you only need optical fluids in microscopes
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@zetasyanthis the cabling alone connecting the probe station to the measurement equipment has orders of magnitude more capacitance than what we need to measure
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@zetasyanthis let me tell you, trying to measure pF-scale parasitic capacitances is a nightmare
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@zetasyanthis https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/taiyo-yuden/JMK021BJ103KK5W/6198379 ah, yes, it is, here's 10 nF somehow squeezed into an 8 mil by 4 mil package
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@zetasyanthis afawk it's the smallest standard size currently available, though i suspect metric 0201 will be available at some point (if it isn't already)
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@zetasyanthis no, 0.01 by 0.005 inches

roughly 0.4 by 0.2 mm
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@zetasyanthis some of the pads are visible without a microscope, as long as you have really good eyesight!
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@zetasyanthis it actually has an interesting thing we haven't seen before; several 01005 capacitors are to be mounted *on* the die
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@zetasyanthis this one is pretty large, actually; it's nearly a centimeter on its long side! and like 3 mm on the short side
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@zetasyanthis it's really weird when you see magic smoke and then everything seems to be working perfectly! (as perfectly as it was before, anyway, what with the large quiescent current problem we were trying to pinpoint)
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@zetasyanthis we don't really have a proper setup for working on individuated dice right now
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@zetasyanthis the die was sitting on the cardboard, so that liquid crystal spilling off the edge wouldn't get into the vacuum system (intended to hold wafers down)
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@zetasyanthis while we were trying to figure out how to use the hotspotting technique with liquid crystal, we thought we'd killed a die when we saw smoke coming up from it... the liquid crystal went completely black over the entire surface, too. but it was working perfectly fine afterward, somehow

when cleaning up at the end of the day, it turned out that there was a perfect black rectangle in the cardboard we'd used to keep the liquid crystal from getting all over the probe station
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@zetasyanthis there's a 750 volt, 40 amp power supply in our coworker's lab

we have no idea what they're doing with it, but it's a Lot
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@zetasyanthis we didn't either until a week or two ago!
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@zetasyanthis https://awoo.space/@Felthry/106910853437786798 Here!
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@zetasyanthis speaking of, did you see our thread on hotspotting the other day? Seems like stuff you'd find interesting
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