My Fermilab story: when I was designing my dissertation experiment it became clear that i would need ~$100k in silicon strip charged particle detectors, and that no company would ever microbond the thousands of connections for me due to the low volume. Fermilab gave me detectors that had been QC rejects from the outer barrel of the CMS detector at CERN for free, and bonded them to my boards for essentially materials cost. For my purposes they worked perfectly. The microbonding machines and the wonderful people associated with them are still to the best of my knowledge the only viable place in the US to have 9x9 cm silicon autobonded in small volume.