Has anyone used a YBD868 IC tester / identifier?

[IBM Portable PC]

YBD868 YouTube: Digital IC Tester YBD868 Integrated Circuit Tester YBD-868

Google Search: YBD 868

I was thinking about buying one to identify chips where the numbers have been sanded off, in an attempt to stop reverse engineering. This approach would be much easier than decapping chips, if it works. Then again, not all chips have the chip number on the die anyway...

The device appears to be unique, I am yet to find another device with this capability. I would certainly love to see a teardown at some point.

 

[cjs]

There are quite a number of devices out there that do this kind of thing. The only one I have personal experience with is the BackBit Chip Tester Pro V2. It is considerably smaller, has a much better display, it seems to do more (e.g., dump ROMs), it worked pretty well, and the one time we needed support it was fantastic. (We needed to dump the character ROM from a Japanese TRS-80 Model I, which is a variant of the Motorola MCM6670/MCM6674; the designer added this capability within a few days. So presumably it now dumps all variants of these chips.)

 

[IBM Portable PC]

There are quite a number of devices out there that do this kind of thing. The only one I have personal experience with is the BackBit Chip Tester Pro V2. It is considerably smaller, has a much better display, it seems to do more (e.g., dump ROMs), it worked pretty well, and the one time we needed support it was fantastic. (We needed to dump the character ROM from a Japanese TRS-80 Model I, which is a variant of the Motorola MCM6670/MCM6674; the designer added this capability within a few days. So presumably it now dumps all variants of these chips.)

Thanks, yes I saw the BackBit Tester on YouTube, however, the reviews appeared to imply that it could only test known chips and was not able to also identify them. I see from the website that it can indeed identify chips, although even there this feature is barely mentioned, including in the manual. I have emailed BackBit to clarify further.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I have an old Xeltek programmer that does a fair job at identifying many TTL chips; mostly simple combinatorial and single-level flip-flop type devices. Obviously, if it doesn't already know how a given type behaves, the identification will fail. Given the bewildering variety of logic families in the TTL arena (e.g. 74ALBxxx), I wonder if a completely accurate identification is possible. I also suspect that most can't identify the really old TTL stuff (e.g. Motoroal MC400 series).

 

[NeXT]

I was looking at these last year when I was looking to get a modern take on another older style of handheld IC tester and identification tool. It does seem to be a lot better at identifying chips from videos and reading the documentation but it's way too expensive to investigate further.