they were made available in the early 90s for teaching people how it works.
But there are so few transparent IC that it's almost crazy. There's been transparent game systems, transparent computers, etc but I have not seen a transparent CPU, transparent 7400's, etc. Obviously light can affect the electronics but I would think at low frequency like Arduino, light wouldn't be an issue.
You could always go and grab some old EPROMS or some of the old 8751 types that had the clear windows on them so you could erase them. They were fun to look at under a microscope.
Exposure to light can indeed influence semiconductors. The existance of UV erasable EPROMs should give you a hint here.
Besides, transparent materials are more expensive than black plastic. It would have a large impact on costs - and have no real functional purpose
In fact, I can't think of any reasons to make a transparent IC unless it's doing something with optics and needs to, or like the motorola one, as an educational aid.
No. but IC bodies are deliberately opaque because all semiconductor devices are affected
by light. A photodiode is just a diode with an anti-reflection coating and the pn-junction
close to one surface really.
The fundamental things that happen in semiconductor devices are drift, diffusion, recombination and
generation. Generation of electron-hole pairs can be thermal or optical.
