Data recovery from a BURNED EPROM? ;)

This is an experiment we made some months ago.

It’s about a damaged EPROM. It was inserted backwise into his socket, so it was burned. We saw it and we had an idea…

The EPROM was crack-opened by the owner. A microscope image show us that connections in +Vcc and Ground were interrupted. So EPROM wasn’t recognized by our instruments.

Our idea was to try reconnecting the pin to the pad into the silicon circuit, applying two tiny wires.

Result wasn’t good on this EPROM: we can read it but the content is blanked out, maybe for the current spike as a result of the wrong insertion. We think is completely damaged.

So we tried this test on another purposefully damaged EPROM… and we had a success: we did the pin connection, EPROM was succesfully red and we also were able to reprogram it 🙂

So we think this kind of data recovery from a burned EPROM is sometime profitable. 🙂