The special chips described are silicon carbide; note the caveat of much lower transistor density!
Remember that the Russians managed to get photos of the surface with 1970s technology. One of the main obstacles seems to have been getting the lens caps off the cameras once they'd survived the landing.
Not an expert in batteries but Wikipedia says molten salt batteries provide high amount of power only for a short period of time:
> Once activated, they provide a burst of high power for a short period (a few tens of seconds to 60 minutes or more), with output ranging from watts to kilowatts.
Molten salt batteries are mostly not practical (who wants to carry around some explosives at boiling water temperature), but the single use cells get some usage because of this feature. Rechargeable ones don't.
> The Venera 9 and 10 landers had two cameras each. Only one functioned because the lens covers failed to separate from the second camera on each lander. The design was changed for Venera 11 and 12, but this change made the problem worse and all cameras failed on those missions. Venera 13 and 14 were the only landers on which all cameras worked properly; although unfortunately, the titanium lens cap on Venera 14 landed precisely on the area which was targeted by the soil compression probe.
[1] http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1442008/