Wouldn't it make sense for the IC manufacturer to stock
a bunch of inexpensive "converter boards" that they
could use to solder in their own itty bitty ICs
ON DEMAND? The user might have to pay for this
service, but it would greatly ease the prototyping
situation. I imagine it would not be hard at all
for an IC company to set up such a DIP conversion
station where a few workers would solder the
requested ICs to their respective DIP boards. It
might even become company policy to produce a certain
number of DIP-converted ICs and keep them in stock
whenever a new IC becomes available. As the stock
became depleted they could determine what kind of
demand they have for that particular IC in its
DIP-converted form, and adjust the stock accordingly.

This is a win-win situation for both the IC manufacturer
and the buyer. The manufacturer is going to sell
thousands of their "regular" itty bitty  ICs for
every one they mount on a DIP or SIP converter board
that the designer can then use to evaluate and prototype
the end product. Even though the demand for the
DIP-converted IC will be very very small compared to
the total number of that IC produced and sold, still
they would not have those BIG sales without first
having the product designed into an actual product.
And so it makes great sense for the IC manufacturer
to make it easy to design their ICs into a product.
That design process involves the building of test
circuits and prototypes. Any company that provides the
engineer with products they can easily breadboard will
be way ahead of the game.

And if ONE company started to do this and met with
great success, then the others would probably end up
doing it, too.

Since the manufacturer would be buying the DIP converters
in very large volume, their added cost would be
reasonably small, and they could simply pass that cost
on to the buyer.... or absorb the cost just as they do
now when they provide us with free samples.

Maybe some company like MAXIM might consider doing such
a thing for the sake of keeping their customers happy
and coming back for more.

Fr. Tom McGahee