Name that Ware, April 2026

The Ware for April 2026 is a little bit different. Instead of showing a circuit board, I thought it’d be interesting to go inside the chips themselves and try to identify what’s happening on at the silicon level. Since chip reading isn’t a widely spread skill, we’ll start with a gentle introduction. For this series of wares, I’ll tell you exactly which chip these images are from: they’re from the Baochip-1x. It’s unique in that at least some of the source code is available – enough of it to give significant hints as to what’s going on. It’s also unique in that it was packaged to explicitly facilitate non-destructive IR imaging, thus allowing us to look at the chip without destroying it. A good place to start for chip reading is learning how to read RAM macros. So, this month’s ware consists of several RAM macros. The challenge is to guess the total number of bits (given as an X by Y amount) in each example. Each of these RAMs exist inside the Baochip-1x, so that pre-constrains the…