Temporarily Paralyzing the MSP430 Memory Bus

I've been playing lately with the use of light to induce temporary faults within a decapped MSP430F1101A. The chip, pictured above, was decapped by Chris of Flylogic Engineering. Lacking a convenient source of UV with which to begin erasing flash memory, I tried the flash from my digital camera. What luck!


Although it appears that flash memory has been reset, that is not in fact the case. The memory bus is paralyzed, with all reads returning 0xFFFF. This includes Flash, RAM, and ROM regions. After a while, this effect dissipates and memory returns to normal.

I'll soon begin to experiment with different wavelengths, durations, and polarizations of light. Please email me if you've any advice to offer.

Cheers,
--Travis