NextSeq 550 Image Sensor Under An XRay

It’s been a crazy week with a number of client projects piling up and an awful cold. But hay, that’s not your problem! Anyway… a number of things have got me thinking that it would be nice to have more… diverse noninvasive imaging capabilities.

Currently I use an old $300 Nikon metallurgy microscope with a slipping Z-stage (which is what I used to look at the MiSeq image sensor). This week the Z-stage completely failed, and I ended up piling up junk to build some kind of functional imaging system… So I’m acquiring a new Amscope metallurgy microscope… cheap, but hopefully functional.

In addition to regular optical imaging. I’ve been looking at other options too. One is IR imaging of silicon (thank to bunnie for promoting this!). I tried a number of experiments here, and think it might be a useful tool to have.

The other is XRay imaging. Years ago I picked up an old dental XRay with the idea of using it for PCB inspection. But generally failed to find a decent XRay source. Well, times moved on, and you can now pick up a digital Dental XRay for a few hundred dollars on eBay.

The nice thing about these is they come with portable, battery powered XRay generator… which I hope is sufficiently well shielded. It arrived today, and I took some very quick initial images of the NextSeq 550 image sensor PCB:

The quality is pretty reasonable, but quite cluttered in dense parts of the PCB. But this might just be enough to give some hints as to a chips identity.

If you have any (small) parts you’d kind imaged under an Xray feel free to end them my way!