mikebco

And repair. Repairing always uses fewer resources than making new.

While I personally and professionally select use repairable items in lieu of non-repairable ones, I believe that this is not entirely a personal issue. Another r-word to add should be regulation. Without some degree of enforcement, the present set of incentives will continue to worsen the situation.

What kind of chip layout/validation tools and methods would have been used for this chip? The layout does not appear to be as dense or uniform as other chip images that I've seen. Is the large spacing between elements more indicative of a prototype that would have been refined later in production?

Have you performed any teardowns and analysis of any similar but newer chips? If so, how does architecture and manufacture compare? Have there been any significant changes in state-of-the-art over the last two decades?