Decapsulating ICs used to be an exotic technique. (I should know, I did that professionally for one of the big IC vendors back in the 1980s.) These days, more and more people are learning to take apart ICs for a variety of reasons. If you are interested in doing it yourself, [Juan Carlos Jimenez] has a post you should read about using acid to remove epoxy from ICs.
[Juan Carlos] used several different techniques with varying degrees of success. Keep in mind, that using nitric acid is generally pretty nasty. You need safety equipment and be sure to plan for bad things to happen. Have eyewash ready because once you splash acid in your eye, it is too late to get that together.
We never took apart MEMS devices, so that was especially interesting. A little metal lid keeps the epoxy out of the moving parts and that turns out to be hard to remove.
We were surprised he used 69% nitric. We used to use white fuming nitric, but that may be a bit harder to get now since it is associated with explosives. Then again, you can make it yourself. We used to also use copper bars to sit between the hot plate and the device to get better heat transfer. The acid reaction is much stronger when you heat it.
By the way, if you ever wanted to actually probe the device, you’d have to remove the passivation layer which is SiO2 glass. That takes hydrofluoric acid which is very nasty stuff, indeed. You can see the edge of the passivation around the bond pads under a microscope. You’ll notice the surf ..
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