I'm currently partway through The ZX Spectrum ULA: How To Design a Microcomputer, which is the book partly researched by photographing and reconstructing the exact IC layout of the Spectrum's ULA. So it goes into a lot of detail about how ICs were produced in general, the nature of ULAs, the Spectrum's design constraints, how they therefore ended up laying things out and all that sort of stuff. As someone who has previously looked no lower than product data sheets it's fascinating.
Does anyone know of any similar sort of details about the Sam's ASIC? Presumably it's a similar process — application-specific interconnects added to a generic, previously manufactured base — but benefitting from seven years of advances in density? Though the Sam's design process seems to have been quite extended, so maybe they used some other process? I guess nobody has the resources to have photographed one but what documentation do we have? Google's not turning much up.
