This Guy Designed His Own Microprocessor Chip -- But Is This REALLY Design?

First, hats off to this fellow.  He deserves a lot of credit for even trying this.  

But... I think this show how DIFFERENT designging these chips is from what we would consider traditional ham radio homebrew design and construction.  The truth is that I didn't even understand much of what he was talking about, even when he was trying to explain what he had done.    

There does seem to be at least a little common ground (!):  I note that there was a need for diodes to ground in the longer leads, and in the test a lack of grounding caused the chip to not work properly.  

Thanks to Hack-A-Day for alerting us to this.  

What do you guys think? Is this concept of design similar to traditional ham radio concepts?