Reverse Engineering A Counterfeit 7805 Voltage Regulator
Ken Shirriff has a great post on his blog about reverse engineering how a 7805 voltage regulator works:
Under a microscope, a silicon chip is a mysterious world with puzzling shapes and meandering lines zigzagging around, as in the magnified image of a 7805 voltage regulator below. But if you study the chip closely, you can identify the transistors, resistors, diodes, and capacitors that make it work and even understand how these components function together. This article explains how the 7805 voltage regulator works, all the way down to how the transistors on the silicon operate. And while exploring the chip, I discovered that it is probably counterfeit.
Check out the interactive schematic and transistor visualization that Ken created in the post, it’s quite interesting to see how the schematic maps to parts of the chip!
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