Processor Lifecycle

The contributors to tweakers.net have come up with a really interesting article, Chip Magicians at Work: Patching at 45nm. The article just skims over some of the iterative development process, but exposes some really cool technology that's utilized to get a processor into production. Debugging can be "done by evaporating certain chemicals into the laser beam, which are then shot directly into the chip. Using corrosives, connections can be broken, while metal and silicon are used to make new structures." Read the article for the full effect, but clearly someone at Intel has their thinking cap on. Note: I originally found this on Slashdot.