SD cards and microSD cards are streak-based capacity gadgets utilized broadly in cameras and telephones. You can see the size difference between a microSD card and a full-size SD card in the pictures below.

A monolithic device has the controller, memory chips and some other discrete segments, joined and incorporated with a solitary chip or device. It is one piece, so you can't separate a solid device into discrete component. To the eye, a monolithic device shows up as only a bit of dark plastic like the example below.

With a monolithic device, we cannot remove the memory chip(s) as they are all part of the same package. In these situations, we need to remove the plastic coating from the device so that we can visually see and map out the circuitry. Then we need to determine how we can connect to this existing circuitry to gain access to the memory contents. Some connections for previously discovered microSD cards are shared and available to professional data recovery companies using a web-based database.

Having determined where we need to connect to the device, we now must tediously solder wires from the adapter board to the device. Then we can use a chip reader to connect to the adapter and read off the memory contents. Finally, we need to figure out the data layout as we do with the non-monolithic devices and ultimately recover the data. To the left is a picture showing our connections to access the memory devices on a monolithic SD card.

After a few hours of hard work, finally we found all the files and ready to create an image for this SD Card!