A CT scanner reveals surprises inside the 386 processor's ceramic package

Does it look like the almost connected pins could have been purposely severed during production? ie: could they have been connected and then using a calculated pulse of power, disconnected?

This isn't about CT scanning, but about the chip itself.

Since the bond wires are just hanging out in air, does this mean that a chip like this could be ruined by dropping it which might cause the bond wires to move enough to short something?

Thanks for all your hard work!

Is the CPU destroyed by the process or did you reassemble this particular specimen?

What is your CPU's yearly deductible?

Since the 386 is a 32-bit processor, the address specifies a 32-bit word and doesn't use address bits A0 and A1. But what if you just want to read a byte or a 16-bit word? The trick is that the 386 provides four Byte Enable outputs (BE0#-BE3#) that indicates which bytes in the word are being transferred. Of course, it's not that simple. If the lower 16 bits of the data bus aren't being used, the upper 16 bits of the data bus are duplicated on the lower 16 bits to make 16-bit buses more efficient (somehow).