I'm always amazed at how people can make out anything without having the individual metal layers present as well to show vertical and horizontal connections in these die photographs.
The 386 has two layers of metal, which makes it an order of magnitude more difficult to reverse engineer. I don't have a good process for removing one layer of metal at a time, so I end up having to puzzle over faint patterns in the metal to determine what is going on.
The two layers of metal also make it much harder to make diagrams that show what is going on in the circuit without turning into a tangle of lines. In this article, I decided not to try, and went straight to schematics.
The two layers of metal also make it much harder to make diagrams that show what is going on in the circuit without turning into a tangle of lines. In this article, I decided not to try, and went straight to schematics.