Various OP177 die images

March 23, 2019, 4:34 pm

I bought some OP177G in SOIC8 on eBay. The strange thing about them was that while I bought 10 on the same piece of cut tape, the packages were different… I figured there was a high probability that they were fake.

I decapped them using an Olfa cutter (box cutter) blade. All things considered this decapping process works surprisingly well. With some effort, I think you can do better (@marcan42 has used this method with reasonable results which is what gave me the idea in the first place).

They were imaged under the same inspection microscope (Amscope) that I use for soldering. While the images are not great, the feature sizes are huge so it doesn’t matter so much.

I also purchased some OP177s from Digikey… turns out that while the packages look kind of fake, the dies appear to be identical!