OT: re: drilling a hole through a Pentium chip

[Dale Grover]

Two thoughts:

1  Don't drill a hole--attach a loop to some metal pin/pad. 
If PGA, I'd just shear off all the pins, leaving pads on
back, then take a piece of copper, brass, or tin-plated
steel and solder it on.  (Epoxy would work too.)  BTW, MSU
salvage probably has a bunch of these for cheap, if you need
a few tries to get it right--or have friends who need key
chains too.

2  HSS (high speed steel--typical drill bit) definitely
won't hack it.  I don't think even carbide drill bits would
be happy, but I could be wrong.  Diamond-based abrasives or
cutting tools will do it.  Patience, a hardwood dowel, drill
press, and some abrasives would also do it, just take
longer.  If possible, much easier to go with #1.  Ceramics
don't like being cut with everyday tooling.  But many
ceramic packages are a sandwich, and can be split along the
cement line to reveal the chip inside.  Much nicer than a
monolithic ceramic package, no?

Ceramics are neat materials, but not as easy to play with as
plastics and metals.  Given the forces involved, Intel (and
everyone else) needs a pretty rugged package to handle the
non-zero force per pin x many many pins.  Then add amazing
heat flow.  Coefficient of expansion close to silicon. 
Etc., etc.  Lots of engineering that goes *around* the chip,
not just in it.  Still a bit strange that, susceptible as it
is to a tiny static discharge, an IC can be physically
almost bullet proof.  Or Ben proof :)

--Dale