Tootfinder

For some reason the combination of 160K and my Mitutoyo 100x/0.90 objective means that as the last bits of ILD begin to etch away, substrate features become *less* visible.
I expected to see strong contrast at edges of substrate features when the ILD was etched away despite poly, STI trenches, and diffusion areas all being the same material (silicon).
But that's not what I'm seeing.
Going back to my archives, though, most of my good full die 100x shots are with the …

And another couple of etch cycles on the PIC12F683 done.
On the home stretch, I've almost got the last of the dielectric off. But I don't want to be too aggressive because ideally I'd get a beauty shot of intact poly across the whole die first, *then* undercut the poly and get a substrate image.
So I'm still doing my usual 2 minutes etch, then image routine. It'll take as long as it takes.

FinVet: A Collaborative Framework of RAG and External Fact-Checking Agents for Financial Misinformation Detection
Daniel Berhane Araya, Duoduo Liao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11654

FinVet: A Collaborative Framework of RAG and External Fact-Checking Agents for Financial Misinformation Detection
Financial markets face growing threats from misinformation that can trigger billions in losses in minutes. Most existing approaches lack transparency in their decision-making and provide limited attribution to credible sources. We introduce FinVet, a novel multi-agent framework that integrates two Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines with external fact-checking through a confidence-weighted voting mechanism. FinVet employs adaptive three-tier processing that dynamically adjusts verifi…

As I continue to slowly roll out Trixie to more of my fleet: my first virtual desktop VM (my mail client system) to be upgraded works fine for a while, then randomly seems to lock the screen and blank my VNC session after a few minutes of inactivity.
If I log into the VM console from the hypervisor UI and unlock, the VNC comes back.
Wonder what's up there...

OK fedi hivemind... I'm looking for a flat square of material about 1cm on a side and maybe 1mm thick that is going to survive being boiled in hot nitric/sulfuric acid for a couple of minutes, then rinsed in acetone and water.
I'm thinking a glass or ceramic, but don't have a source for ready made chunks of the right size (microscope coverglasses are too fragile).
You can get pre-diced silicon wafers with chunks the right size (e.g. Ted Pella 16006) but that's ann…

Took a few minutes over lunch to iron out the last of the bugs in the happy path of PCIe link training.
There's no timeouts or fallback if there's problems but if the other side is happy, it will train up to L0 and then sit there ignoring all incoming traffic.
After a while, the link partner gets mad that it hasn't seen a single DLLP from me and drops the link. I don't implement recovery yet so things go downhill from there.

Another few minutes in HF on the PIC12F683 sample and it looks like parts of M2 are starting to delaminate, while other parts still had oxide over them??
Gonna clean and see how this goes. This is the sort of thing that makes wet-etch deprocessing challenging though.

Back to delayering the PIC12F683. I have a ton of imagery and could do some narrated analysis already but my throat is still sore from being sick so I don't want to be recording any audio.
This is after another three minutes in room temperature Whink. I got a fresh squirt of acid in case the old stuff was getting reacted away but I don't think there is enough glass in this sample to meaningfully dilute it.

Second time in the past couple of days that I've joined a Teams call for work, hear the person leading the meeting go "We're still missing a few people let's give them a couple minutes", then silence.
And silence.
And 5 minutes later I get a text from someone asking where I am, and I'm like "still in the meeting waiting for people to join?"
But apparently the connection got borked after I joined and I got silently disconnected server side…

15GB of raw footage, 45 minutes of edited video so far.
Still haven't even done a bare-die (vs partial) decap yet, or any delayering, or any extensive circuit analysis.
This is going to be LONG.