Good concept for a benchtop prototyping apparatus.
If you looked into some of the early cheap Chinese glow-pattern trinkets and musical greeting cards, the IC often looked quite "home made", having a central irregular blob of epoxy covering the fabricated device in the middle of a small square ceramic substrate. With a few not-so-thin wires coming out from under the epoxy, tieing it into the discrete components, if any.
I would imagine at the time the primary requirement was for the component to simply cost less and be way smaller than an alternative stuffed PCB, without any real need for it to be fabricated as one of the actual "chips" off of a silicon wafer.
Depending on what power of "microscope" you are willing to limit yourself to, it might not be as difficult to see microchips (or at least micro IC's) in your forseeable future.
If you looked into some of the early cheap Chinese glow-pattern trinkets and musical greeting cards, the IC often looked quite "home made", having a central irregular blob of epoxy covering the fabricated device in the middle of a small square ceramic substrate. With a few not-so-thin wires coming out from under the epoxy, tieing it into the discrete components, if any.
I would imagine at the time the primary requirement was for the component to simply cost less and be way smaller than an alternative stuffed PCB, without any real need for it to be fabricated as one of the actual "chips" off of a silicon wafer.
Depending on what power of "microscope" you are willing to limit yourself to, it might not be as difficult to see microchips (or at least micro IC's) in your forseeable future.