# Large IC chips! Biggest I've ever seen



## Alondro (Apr 18, 2022)

These are some huge old IC chips from boards made in the 80's. I've never come across any of this size in my scrapping until now. The boards are from Japan, so likely pretty high quality. I'd like to find out something about them before I rip them apart, but so far I haven't had any luck tracking them down online.


----------



## Quiklearner (Apr 19, 2022)

Do you know what the boards came out of?


----------



## Alondro (Apr 20, 2022)

Quiklearner said:


> Do you know what the boards came out of?


No idea. They were simply in a big tub of mixed mid-grade boards, mainly coming out of industrial and telecom computers. There were also some from broken arcade games and pinball machines.


----------



## KalleMP (Apr 21, 2022)

Alondro said:


> These are some huge old IC chips from boards made in the 80's. I've never come across any of this size in my scrapping until now. The boards are from Japan, so likely pretty high quality. I'd like to find out something about them before I rip them apart, but so far I haven't had any luck tracking them down online.
> 
> View attachment 49613


Those big chips look like ceramic hybrids at first glance. Try and break a lid and see if the internal components have exposed gold bonding wires. 

Hybrids by definition are all different, so some may have a few power semiconductors that often use aluminium bonding wires and others may have bigger integrated circuits with lots of gold bonding wires.

Random hybrid picture


https://micropt.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/DSCN2768-1-768x576.jpg


----------



## Alondro (Apr 21, 2022)

KalleMP said:


> Those big chips look like ceramic hybrids at first glance. Try and break a lid and see if the internal components have exposed gold bonding wires.
> 
> Hybrids by definition are all different, so some may have a few power semiconductors that often use aluminium bonding wires and others may have bigger integrated circuits with lots of gold bonding wires.
> 
> ...


I'm going to save them for now. I still have tubs full of stuff to dismantle, so I'll get back to them and other unknowns after I take care of the huge amount of typical boards and parts.


----------



## justprofessor49 (Apr 21, 2022)

This is the small footprint package.


----------



## Alondro (Apr 21, 2022)

justprofessor49 said:


> This is the small footprint package.


I found a few pics online from the same manufacturer of chips that are smaller than mine, but look like the same sort of housing with the purplish ceramic top. Some had bond wires around the chip, while another had a network of flat gold-plated traces leading to a chip and other little things I couldn't see clearly in the photo of that one. So there could be a numbers of possibilities inside these big ones.


----------

