Comment by ipdashc

What I've always wondered was, how is it possible to do this process (or well, the less advanced version of it, for smaller/older chips) cheaply/at massive scale, for those ICs that cost a few cents in bulk?

Like, scaling wafer (die?) production to insanely low costs makes intuitive sense. The input is sand, the process itself is just easily-parallellizable chemistry and optics, and the output is a tiny little piece of material.

But packaging sounds as though it requires intricate mechanical work to be done to every single output chip, and I just can't wrap my head around how you scale that to the point where they cost a few cents...