fyi: from the 6502 faq:
/* How do you turn bitmaps into polygons?/
We draw them in our custom Python app. We spent about two months
looking at automatic vectorization and using the bitmaps to create
polygon fragments, but neither of these was better than just sitting
down and clicking out the polygons. It's almost essential to have our
own vector drawing app, so we can control snapping, do fancy copy-paste,
get good vector data, and greatly speed up the work.
/* How did automatic vectorization fail?/
It was more work to clean up the results of automatic vectorization than
to do clean work in the first place. Damage, dirt, and ambiguous or
falsely detected features in the chip die shots create problems. We
also rely on finding and modelingburied contacts
<http://www.intel4004.com/buried.htm>like they would appear in the
original fabrication masks, not like they appear in silicon. This is
very difficult, if not impossible, to do automatically.
I'm not surprised by this. So in the end, a human brain figured out
where the polygons are. It might be a fun "internet distributed"
project to farm out sections to lots of people and then assemble the
results...
-brad
