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Emulating audio IC’s – from scanning the chip with a microscope

Emulating audio IC’s – from scanning the chip with a microscope

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Giulioz gives a sequel to last year’s talk “Proprietary silicon ICs and dubious marketing claims? Let’s fight those with a microscope!“, where he showed how he reverse engineered a pretty old device by looking at microscope silicon pics alone, with manual tracing and some custom tools.

Fast forward, he shows how he reverse engineered a much modern chip: the custom Roland/Toshiba TC170C140 ESP chip (1995). Completing this task required a different approach, as doing it manually would have required too much time. He used a guided, automated approach that combines clever microscopy with computer vision to automatically classify standard cells in the chip, saving us most of the manual work.

They then sped things up even further by directly probing the chip: by exploiting test routines and sending random data to the chip he figured out how the internal registers worked to create a bit-accurate emulator. He even gives the source code out on github so you can emulate the devices yourself.

Listen to the result at 32:19 where they play Darude Sandstorm.

Links:

Psychoacoustics

Psychoacoustics

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Binaural beats, tritone paradox, pitch and tempo circularity, wason effect for faking high performance audio, biological audio effects, and using missing fundamentals for playback on phones and low-quality devices? Casey Connor demonstrates some fascinating audio effects and illusions in his multi-part series of audio illusions and effects. Some of them are used to simulate high performance playback on cheap devices like phones. Good headphones are required for some of them.

Here’s the first video go get you started:

Pentangle

Pentangle

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The 70’s was famous for folk songs, but did you know this trend was also occurring overseas as well? Pentangle did a number of folk songs – but the songs they song weren’t from 20 or 30 years earlier like in the US. They were from 300 years earlier in 1775 like this song – Willy O Winsbury.

They also recorded this fantastic version of Hunting Song: