I sometimes work with chips at my university, I see layouts on my computer, on wall posters at the university, but I never see them for real. So I wanted to see it with my own eyes, but it’s not easy because most of the time it’s inside a package that is hard to open.
So I thought, there is a die inside smartcards, and smartcards are easier to open. Here is a good schematic on wikipedia showing how they are constructed. Smartcards are a sandwich of plastic, die and connector.
I got an old smartcard (used for parking in Paris) and I’ll try to open it.
To start I cut the plastic near the connector, then, with a dremel I made a little incision to separate the chip/connector part from the plastic.
I then removed the plastic with my hands and removed all the plastic films (they are just glued).
And there we have the chip with a view on the die ! We can see the small wires going from the die to the connector.
We might try to see the die layout, but this will require a microscope… maybe next time !