Been doing a lot of reading on the development and packaging of the early IC chips. Chips made 1975 and earlier (basically first four years of commercial chip production) should probably be separated from all others. As these chips will have gold bonding wires and the method of attaching the chip cell to the package used gold as well. After 1975 some chips use a aluminum bonding wire and the use of silver adhesives increased for the attaching of cells to package frames. It might be worth it if you have a lot of early dated IC's to separate those and sell them for their higher gold content. Ceramic chips continued to have a higher gold content into the early eighties. Processors, memory and military/aviation chip a higher gold content into the mid 90's. After 1995 gold content becomes less and less. I'm separating my early chips by date and type into one pound packages. The ones after 1995 all go together in five pound bags. After 1995 I only separate gold plated chips and CPU's.
The other than scrap early chips, the "pulls", from the right chip family, prices can start at $5 and go above $100 per chip to a collector. I say that because only recently I have found some collectable chips that I had threw in with all the others.
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