"Richard Casady" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:10:40 -0700, "Calif Bill"
wrote:

They probably got stolen
masks as there was bad circuit in the design and was just wired around.
The
bad circuit with wire around was in the Russian built chip.

The must have got the masks, since reverse engineering a chip is
impossible. I understand eight or more layers are common. To digress,I
wouldn't mind having a five by five foot high resolution photo of one
to hang on the wall.

Casady

I have 8x11 shots of DSP's. Even a few DSP's from a wafer. The wafer over
the years has gotten more and more broken. Was an Apps engineer for TI in
one of my careers. 8080 probably only had 4-6 layers. Reverse engineering
is not impossible, just not financially practical. We actually opened up
chips and changed connections on prototype custom chips. Mostly when the
customer screwed up. They design the chip and run simulations. And they
forget to connect a section to another output stage.