Some people asked for some of those older Atmel parts after seeing the MEGA88 and ATMEGA169 teardowns.

Here’s a quick one on the AT90S8515. It’s still very popular even though it’s been replaced by the MEGA8515. It’s built on a larger process and it’s not planarized (.50um and below are planarized but you may find some .50um non-planarized)

8KB Flash, 512 Byte SRAM, 512 Byte EEPROM with 32 working registers. That’s sooo nice! 4x faster than the typical PIC.

There was a mistake in the above picture too when we highlighted the areas! We forgot to outline the EEPROM area.

The side of the array is touching the ‘8’ in 8KB EEPROM above and it runs vertical along-side the FLASH. So in theory there are two 8 bit FLAH arrays and a single 8 bit EEPROM area all running veritical in the “8KB Flash” highlighted area.

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We were curious if Atmel has finally shrunk the AVR series smaller than the current 350nm 3 metal layer process. Their main competitors (Microchip) have began showing 350nm 4 metal layer devices and Atmel has a few new product lines out (CAN, Picopower, and USB featured devices).

We chose to examine their picoPower line of AVR’s since they claim true 1.8v operation. The only picoPower device in stock from Digikey was the ATMEGA169P. We used the 64 pin TQFP package for our review.

We took some quick images of some areas we think you will enjoy-

Delayering the device is one of the steps in analyzing any substrate. The part below was being delayered to remove it’s top two metal layers. The part is in-between Metal3 (M3) and Metal1 (M1) right now. Some of Metal2 (M2) has begun to remove. More time would finish off the removal of M2 but this was enough for us.

We are very familiar with the Atmel AVR line (to include the AT90SC smartcard family) and thus left it in the package not being concerned (there are various reasons to remove it completely out of the carrier it is bonded in which we won’t get into here).

The lower corner has the die identification (AT 355B6), Corporate logo, and the year.

It is our opinion that this processor is one of the most secure from the less-than 32 bit MCU off-the-shelf choices out there. There are debug test-points spread around the device (we would love to hear feedback from whoever thinks they see them hint hint) but don’t try to probe them if the device is locked. Atmel wised up around 2005 are turned those off if the lockbits are set (Hello Arne!).