Nomarski microscopy, Ed. Differential phase contrast microscopy. Makes very small height differences (partial wavelength) on mostly planar objects pop out, and creates amazing color effects as a biproduct. Pretty much a stalwart of any good cleanroom microscope. Every manufacturer offers it, usually a pretty expensive option as all your optics have to be stress-free. I dream to own one of these one day. Marc From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of "cctalk at classiccmp.org" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Reply-To: "COURYHOUSE at aol.com" <couryhouse at aol.com>, "cctalk at classiccmp.org" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Date: Monday, May 20, 2019 at 11:20 AM To: "COURYHOUSE at aol.com" <couryhouse at aol.com>, <spacewar at gmail.com>, "cctalk at classiccmp.org" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Re: HP-01 calc watch go withs - brochures, t- shirts, booklets, ad copy who else collecting? should say Francion Yamamotto not Yrancion Yamamotto In a message dated 5/20/2019 10:07:04 AM US Mountain Standard Time, couryhouse at aol.com writes: Since we have nice microscopes at the museum project we were hired to photo some IC innards years back. This ended up becoming a minor obsession for a short time as the artwork under various illuminations is fantastic. One of the things that seemed to show the mots difference in detail between layers and highs etc... was differential interference contrast (after nomorski (sp?) ( this was on our Ziess Ultraphot and seems to be a Zeiss only offering.0 on the Japanese side of things Nikon had Yrancion Yamamotto (sp?) method which seems nice but I preferred the Nomeriski. Using these methods you may be able to extract more usable detail than with traditional methods. and wow the color photos are frame-able! But kinda what I wanted to mention to is depending on what era the chips were the over coatings seemed to worsen the view the newer the chip or so I thought at the time. Such great fun to photo the little ic innards! even a standard illum. scope with the vertical episcopic illumination gives some fun photos too, especially on the earlier chips. Don't know if any of this will help on the HP-01 roms but sure was fun to talk about again ed sharpe archivist for smecc In a message dated 5/20/2019 9:00:09 AM US Mountain Standard Time, spacewar at gmail.com writes: Only just within the last month I finally obtained a ROM dump from a production HP-01, for potential use in my Nonpareil simulator. Previously I only had the preproduction code listed in a US patent. I'm not sure when I'll have time to actually work on the simulation, though. My original plan had been to crack open an HP-01 module and try to read the ROM bits optically, as Peter Monta did for the HP-35. However, that didn't work, probably due to a passivation coating on the ROM dies.