Maybe that Mitotoyo Z scale is for thickness measurement. Focus on one layer, set it to 0, then focus on the next layer and read the display.

You can see the indents of the optics in the box lid :(

Dave... Please show us more wafers up close! I could watch this for hours.

I *REALLY* want to hear the response from the "eBay Global Shipping Program." A follow up video would be helpful for others that are considering their "service". 1) extremely poor packaging 2) punctured and torn box during shipping 3) no "glass" or "this side up" stickers 4) it should have been at least double boxed with better / more use of foam sheets or bubble wrap. I mean throwing in a few foam chips doesn't do *squat* to protect the extents of the scope. I would want some major compensation even if the light source wasn't broken. If it is packaged by "eBay" they should know all this and how poorly their shipping would treat it.

From here AT&T isn't upside down

I don't know where you bought it, but I think it would be completely fair to simply state "Seller allows other people to pack items for him/her." That's absurd to put something like that in the hands of the guy at the shipper's store. Totally, completely, utterly absurd. And repack? My ass.

Bloody cool that is. Cheers for sharing, Dave.

Impressed you got it working.

Geologist here with plenty of petrographic microscope experience. The optics on that Olympus look fine to me, no obviously glaring defects. The colour with your bodged LED look pretty darn good. A trick I’ve used from the camera side to get optimal white balance is to stick something that’s a neutral grey under the microscope, white balance to that using photo/video editing software or the custom white balance feature in the camera. Now you’ve got a white balance setting for that camera on that microscope that you can reuse whenever you want. But honestly the colour looks more than useable as it’s setup now.

Looks amazing dave :-D, worth every penny.

Great video Dave!

Hi Dave, I have a trinocular Olympus made in Japan scope still in original wood box with spare lenses. Diffuser intact also 11watt bulb haha. Don't know much about these scopes so glad you made this video will have a go at servicing it but it looks in excellent condition all solid metal precision engineering. Thanks for the video.

Very very cool, I've always wanted a scope but couldn't justify the expense on something even half decent that would get limited use. Cheers for the heads-up on the AmScope, they look alright for the price!

I recently purchased a $160 amscope brightfield microscope from ebay. I was blown away by the quality.

In today's episode, Dave miraculously dodges a shipping bullet.

"I had a box of wafers" That's funny. I had just put a bag of chips back in the cupboard when I heard you say that.

My experience is in a medical laboratory, but the microscopes we use are pretty similar except for the light source being beneath the stage. Your lighting looks pretty good to me. The problem with the filament lamps is that they make everything very yellow so you often have to put in a certain blue filter. Depending on the microscopes people trained on, some people had to use the filter and some people had to remove it since accurate colour is essential for diagnoses when everything is a scale in shades of purple. If we switched to LED lights, we'd have to retrain our eyes. One interesting point is that most of the important adjustments (at least on the type of microscope I use) are made to the light *before* it hits the specimen. Intuitively you'd think light is light and if it's illuminated, what's the problem, but it makes a big difference. e.g. The extra little numbers on the objective lenses tell you what to set the aperture iris to for each lens; too closed and it's dark or you only get partial illumination, too open and you lose sharpness of focus and everything seems washed out, it's only a subtle effect though. In terms of brands, I have found Olympus to be the best. I like Nikon cameras but their microscopes aren't nearly as good. Leica microscopes are just shit.

thank you for the insight, btw, your vids on opanps helped me ace my circuits 1 class. you are a real treasure for students like me. please keep it up! you are helping future engineers more than you might realize.

When I was a child I opened the can of a µPD416 NEC RAM to look inside with the microscope at my dad's laboratory, there's so many "things"in such a tiny chip, almost unbelivable. But you're missing a very cool sight there: the bonding of the wires to the chip! Go find a ceramic "can" chip and open it asap to see them!

THose wafer shots, nice!

in this episode Dave gets an awesome microscope and gets us to guess the guest!

Dave, now all you need is a Soxhlet extractor and condenser to decap your own chips in the lab.

What a nice instrument! Are you going to make a video about dumping ROMs of decapped chips?

wow that's beautiful!

The stage can be retightened a little. Both a linear bearings and a gearset. Just undo the bolts, apply a light hand pressure to bar and tight again under pressure, the slack will gone.

I'm amazed that made it. I would never ship something globally unless it was worth a bunch of money and had a very small customer base. But then it would be shipped using a courier or something like that. As an eBay seller I have to put up with plenty of shipping bs just here in the States.

You need a can of "spray air" (which is usually some other clear gas) to clean off the wafer after you dip it in a cleaning fluid. That should eliminate the little gremlins that you see. Don't use ordinary compressed air as it probably had gunk in it. Good old iso-propal alcohol is probably a good solvent.

From some of the markings it looks like it was stepped on a 4x XLS platform. I think the combs were verniers for physical inspection. The probing in the scribe lines looks like you happened upon some slm or etest structures that were probed with a wafer probe card.

Looking forward to any comparisons you make with an Amscope

Hey Dave, Pls make the video of the Flir Thermal Imaging Sensor from your recent tear-down.

Also, that depth of field seems appropriate for the intended purpose. Wafer processes mandates small differences in the topology, and the depth of field you remarked on is actually needed for wafer inspection.

Dude, soo cool! I've been looking for the last two weeks for a metallurgical microscope for home, haven't seen these yet on ebay! I actually plan to use it for micrographs so a lot of other stuff on ebay just won't do.

Get a marble block with rubber feet to stand it on, that will significantly reduce the wobble when you move your mouse, better mounting of your camera would improve it further.

Looks pretty nice... great score, curious as to what you ended up paying. I ran a Leitz wafer inspection 'scope for a year at Motorola MOS4 in the early '80s, in the 02 and 03 (early) layers... building 6809's, 6800s, and 64Kb EPROMs. A good scope holds focus all the way across the stage... if it goes out, then the stage is drooping... not that you're trying to do 1000wafers a shift! Still in the industry, now we maintain/refurbish/augment AMAT equipment.

Just to echo, you really want a polarizer after your light source, to work in conjuction with the analyzer. Use glass polarizers, not plastic. Also, you will want calibration slide (AMscope will do) and eyepiece reticle (Klarmann Rulings are the best). Would love to see you motorize the stage ala microgigapan.

For E-mount adapters and the like, check out a telescope shop. Someone like Bintel in Sydney.

Just a suggestion but a 10W COB might be a more suitable light source if it will fit the holder. Cree LEDS are good but do suffer from colour differences over the field of illumination. The COB gives a more uniform light over a very wide angle.

Expanding foam , double boxed how hard is that. Is it really that much more expensive? And take stuff apart as much as possible, and wrap all pieces separately.

Buy a sack of tennis balls; spread them out in a frame under a slab of wood (or granite); put the microscope on it. That should get rid of the desk coupled vibrations. You still need a light touch for the stage adjustments, or you can fit some steppers and automate the stage movements.

In the lighting-pointing-at-a-stage world, this hot spot is referred to as the "peak". It is related to the physical position of the virtual point of light, within the reflector/lens system. - Does your illuminator have a reflector on it?

Time to break out the fuming nitric acid

Dave that reminds me of a lecture I attended many years ago by a PYE telecoms They showed some chip scans and alongside of a delay line was a steam engine and carriages complete with steam from the funnel and tracks it would have been about 35 years ago Nice score shame about the packing

Why are the instuments in the background upside down? 0:36

Dave, you should try one day some funny things like CCD sensors, printer heads...

Dave I think the description is missing the forum link.

Economy shipping. DOH!

The AMscope's are just rebranded china microscopes which you can get direct from aliexpress yourself. I bought one a while ago for work which cost ~US$400 inc DHL shipping. 7-45x with trinocular and 720p HDMI camera. I was so impressed i got my own one at home and so did another employee. Work bought a 2nd one too. Really amazing for the price. The camera isn't the best but not too bad. You want the $20 0.5x barlow lens for electronics work (much more working distance) Search aliexpress for LuckyZoom thats the seller we all used and didn't have problems.

I think you can remove the camera jitter buy taking it to a machinist and having them bolt on a sturdy gusset that connects to your camera's tripod mount. They should also be able to tighten up ways on that stage to make it move properly.

Hi Dave how do you increase working distance???

Thanks Dave. I didn't need one of these, but now I've got one in the mail. Probably gonna get thrown out of the house.

People seem to have developed amazing faith in the miraculous protective power of bubblewrap... yet everyone enjoys popping the bubbles between their fingers.

Wafers are very reflective, you will need much more light when inspecting dark and rough materials.

I assume packing a delicate instrument would require some higher density foam, custom cut to shape. and then for extra protection, those packing nuts.

Did you find that one in the dumpster too?

Would be fun to measure the transistor size on some various old chips.

I had exactly the same problem a few months ago when I purchased a trinocular microscope with a boom and HDMI camera from china. They just chucked the parts into a box with a bit of bubble wrap and the heavy boom smashed the eyepiece mounts off the head. No one seems to know how to ship things these days.

Hi Dave, I have a times 100 objective for this microscope. have to look for it at the attic but I will send it you! only down side to the 100x objectives ar that you need immersion oil with it... still usefull I think

what's up with the one you were discussing with David2 on a previous video

It's a mixed bag with Ebay Global Shipping: I have had both abysmally bad packing and excellent, double carton, zero damage packing through them. At least the microscope was not badly damaged.

Can't find second video about 3d-printing.

Aww Daveee i was waiting to see a PCB under that :(

Hi Dave, long time viewer, first time commenter. I am a student at R.I.T, U.S.A campuse in the Microelectronics engineering program. I spend a lot of time in the clean room, and use inspection microscopes all the time. It broke my heart to see what the shippers di to your microscope, but I just wanted to point out that typically, wafer test probes (at least using the parameter anylizer that I use) won't leave thos ugly marks on the wafer test pads. There is a precharge function on some parameter analyzers, that allows for precharging before the probes hit the test pads. This can cause a small amount of arcing and burning. I was wondering if this might be the case with your wafer? Again, I am a student, and by no means an expert.

Dave's Apple Laptop Repair Videos coming soon.

Dave, I might be wrong but to me the features at 15:30 look like alignment marks for the stepper/mask aligner. Great optical setup, BTW!

How full is the glass Dave?

GSP indeed repack stuff, I recently get quite a lot of stuff by GSP. It may be bad, but sometimes it's the only way to get stuff, as in pre-GSP era many US-based seller would not even consider sending stuff internationally.

may have been mentioned but the Mitutoyo is an indicator, not a micrometer

Can't you adjust the apature of the microscope an put some more light in? It seems t have a lot purple fringing (you cam see it clearly in the last shots at the edges of the gold pads). Anyway, I like these kinds of things. Would be interesting to see som ESD damaged chips or test video on how much it will take to destroy a chip...

You Can still buy the Globes i put one into a microscope not to long ago part no LS-15 or LS-30 number is Watts.

How is there color on the wafer? Aren't those microscopic structures you're looking at how would they be colored?

Thank

And of course the longer working distance these must be designed for (don't expect oil immersion objectives here :) )

By the way it is not only important that the optics be Plan, but also need to be of M type (metalurgical), which is to say that the glass has the approriate coating to allow the light from the vertical illuminator to go through it and not reflect before hitting the object. Standard biological objectives are not suitable.

Holy shit, I'd be sooo pissed at that packaging. File a complaint for sure. Hell, Olympus might even take the opportunity to throw you a new unit just for the hell of it since it'd be a great promo. General tips if you're going to be doing decapping IC's :: You generally want to have at least a 50% overlap for stitching your images. Chris Tarnovsky (arguably the 'founder'), Joe Grand and Karsten Nohl all have talks from CCC's in the past which list their processes. Ken Schriff (the righto.com guy) also had a nice talk from the HACKADAY on just general MOS and BJT analysis (which was very interesting to hear --- you draw out a BJT and think -- base,collector, emitter -- but some gates are base/emitter/6 collectors so you can source 6 different blocks with their own constant current... stuff like that!) Anyways, good deal on that. Not sure how much you paid for it, but the 80s-90s were the hay day for all Japanese and German optics. Japanese Nikon (Nikkor) line, the Olympus glass, Carl Zeiss, Leica, etc. All absolutely amazing. If you have glass that's scratched up on accessible regions (exterior surfaces), aluminum oxide slurry at like 3 micron is the abrasive of choice in the DIY telescopy community. Obviously don't do this on any contoured surfaces, but most objectives that suffer scratches are almost always on the 2 faces that are exterior-side, and you can essentially 'buff' the imperfection out as long as you have a reference planar surface that's true. Unless the enclosure itself had foreign particulate the assembly and then abrade internally (which does happen but not that often), you have a very good chance of restoring the glass to very good condition by surface lapping. (See Tom Lipton from oxtools/UC Berkeley for a fairly good introduction). Sadly, Modern chips are all at like 22 nm (diffraction limit ~300 nm...) so you have to go to AFM/SEM/TEM sadly for more modern processes. Active rev engers I talk with all have to rent out time on SEMs. The downside is the cost, the upside is most of the SEMs have FIB's on it, so you can do things like mill through layers of poly with amazing precision, or do additive manipulation (chemical vapor deposition of platinum usually) to literally alter the chip at the transistor level. I'd even be curious to know how fab houses do things like mask alignment these days, since equipping a 100k SEM to each calibration/alignment/wafer inspection station sounds economically challenging...

As soon as I seen the box, I thought "Oohh Man". Those packing peanuts are not acceptable in my eyes. I absolutely hate sellers who use that global shipping program, its insanely expensive, way more than regular shipping. Ive had so many good deals turn into ok deals because of those import fees. The whole idea of global shipping is supposed to be to help prevent these things from happening. Beautiful Scope and great video as always. Happy to see you came up with a quick fix, but Id be filing a claim for sure.

It would be interesting to see if an ultra-violent light source could be used on this.

I was just watching another unboxing video when this one came up (-:

do a video where you put plant leafes and such under it :D

I'm surprised nobody uses foam packing that forms around the item. It's two chemicals in a bag, you break the barrier between them and you have foam.

Ohhh that package... I had the same horrible experience (many times), don't know why but always happens with expensive and heavy equipment... clearly awfully packed exactly like your box, bubble wrap protecting nothing, equipment completely lose inside the box, holes everywhere and pieces of equipment sticking out. The box is more like a soft paper ball rather than a box... ohh.. it's heart breaking.. what horrible sight.... =/

Hey Dave, how about checking out some Wifi/Bluetooth chips on the microscope? so we can get some on chip RF goodness.

I keep wanting to drag the vid around :D

As a grad student doing analog IC design, I am very happy to see some IC imaging on here! How close are you getting the 40x objective to the wafer? On the scope we have at uni, it's always so close that I'm afraid I'm going to bang the objective into my die while changing objective or refocusing it (like you, I've found changing objectives doesn't quite maintain focus)... (Also, I'd like a box of wafers. =< Need to figure out how I can find some throwaway wafers!)

Make some chips Dave. You can do it. Bring back the lm3909.

you need a engineers slab maybe half ton to cut down on vibrstion

Now Shahriar needs to find something even bigger and better :)

You can try to inspect some old EPROMs with a glass window to see the die.

How much did you have to pay for that microscope?

Dave, I have been watching your videos for a while... I have received 2 out of 3 items damaged because of GSP / Pitney Bowes... Ebay has to take the cost and do something about this. So we have to protest. Give a call to Ebay, you are insured by the GSP, get your money back 100%... that is what I did.

They must have a quota for shipping material!

I wonder what images would look like with a dynamically adjustable polarized filter over the light source?

Pro tip: Jump to 4:10 to avoid several minutes of Dave complaining.

Where's part 2?

Time for a concrete bench!

lol did you say "... 'streets aheads' in optical quality..." :) Community much? :P

get a granite surface plate as a proper stand for your new microscope

SMT resistor missing at 15:00 xD

Automate the stage and make it into a scanner! ^^

Dave: i'll always be willing to ship you electronics from US (San Diego area). Just hit me up!

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