Tr2sa

Removing CCD/CMOS cover glass - diamond burr works well for milling through the glass. Does work well also for the ceramic casing. Mild ultrasonic cleaning is needed to clean glass dust off and one has to watch, where the dust accumulates - it can break bonding wires if compacted by the burr. Cutting without coolant with slow feed is perfectly ok. Some processes seem to use reflow to give final form to microlenses, so rising chip temperature to 120...170c should make mechanical removal way easier without compromising chip bond to casing. It is a theory, I have not tested it myself on Canon sensors. http://www.google.com.ar/patents/US7388270 About microlenses - highly speculative, but maybe it is possible to recover some efficency by recreating lens array. Alignment (in XY and Z) will be hardest to solve probably. The process described below is too coarse but maybe there are other cheap non-lithographic shortcuts to create array. http://cameramaker.se/microlenses.htm