“AMD and Intel were ahead of their times with their shared-license agreements. These days, no one integrated circuit manufacturer can stand on their own too well, and only multi-partner collaborations can approach the 45nm and 32nm process nodes. I have been putting off looking at some uncapped digital chips because of the die size since we don’t have a low resolution objective that can image most of a 4mm x 4mm chip much less 12mm x 12mm like this. I am trying to avoid using sulfuric acid as much as I can since it takes a long time to neutralize, so the next few IC Fridays will contain larger digital chips. It is admirable that AMD still maintains a decent website for their AM486 line of products.”
Source: http://microblog.routed.net/2007/05/11/ic-friday-amds-am486-dx2/