Quote:
Originally Posted by Shiraz
aaaugh - what rotten luck.
completely from left field, but do you think that it might be possible to salvage 3/4 of the chip either by ablating the offending pixels with a medical YAG, by etching the region or possibly even by physically grinding the surface gates off? worst you could do would be to brick the chip completely rather than partially as it is now. If it could be salvaged, 3/4 of a 16803 is still a pretty impressive camera. Sorry if it sounds like a completely daft idea, but you asked.
|
Not so completely daft at all ... earlier this week I tried to melt the offending pixel with a 4W 532nm CW DPSS focused down to 50 micron. I thought if I could melt/singe the ITO electrode gates into an open circuit I might only lose the top 666 rows (yes the bad pixel is at 3066,666). Amazingly after several 5 min exposures, no change!?! The damaged area is buried in the multi-column saturated region. I can see the irradiated spot in the microscope where I presume the top layers have been melted, or something, but this does not seem to affect the operation of the chip.
Next week I might try a 4 ns pulsed laser, if I can get my hands on one. The ones we make at 532 nm only focus down to about 400 um, pretty big blast hole. We do make a 1064nm YAG that focuses down to 10 um but I know the Silicon doesn't absorb much at that wavelength, so I'm not sure what will happen there.
Very much a long shot...
EB