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The Hacker Fab [1] project at Carnegie Mellon is creating and publishing guides to building simple fab equipment including photolithography and a sputtering system. For somewhat mo…

Ignoring flexibility and cost/performance, this may be a sign that rapid chip fab turnaround times are possible. These were made by Pragmatic Semiconductor [1], who claim they can …

Has anyone used Perforce Helix for this? If you're already using it for large file version control for, e.g., gamedev, and don't mind the cost, how well does it work to store all o…

Custom state-of-the-art silicon is ridiculously expensive. For a minimum 100 wafers = 10k chips, Groq may have paid $100M = $10k/chip purely in amortizing design costs. Chip design…

Pragmatic is very impressive because they're a startup that (a) is building their own chip fab and (b) said fab is much faster and cheaper than existing fabs. They claim [1] to be …

Plasticity is interesting because it is maybe the only way to run the Parasolid geometry kernel natively on Linux right now. Parasolid, the library used to perform the geometric op…

Excellent question! A sufficiently advanced battery can theoretically beat gasoline. Any given energy storage technology can store a maximum amount of energy in a fixed volume or m…

A disappointing fact of chip fabrication is the minimum bar is high and expensive. In other fields, a hobbyist can do wood/metalworking or learn programming or build a robot kit. T…

Lower-level teaching resources definitely exist! Here are my favorites: - The Zero to ASIC course (and Tiny Tapeout) [1] explains transistor circuits and teaches you an open source…

Cool project! Right now y'all look focused on digital logic somewhere between ASICs and FPGAs. Any plans for custom chiplets? Custom analog layout might be much cheaper if done MPW…

I believe this is the Voxa Mochii [1]. [1] https://www.mymochii.com/

The probability may actually be much higher: about 12% per decade for a -850mT event; 1.5% for -1700mT [1]. Wikipedia estimates the Carrington was anywhere from -800 to -1750 [2]. …

A common approach is to use multiple electron beams in parallel ([1] is up to 262144 beams!). This is starting to be used commercially to create the masks for photolithography. [1]…

I do research in a university lab that is also used by a number of companies. People make plenty of transistors, including state-of-the-art research. However, reasonably sized proc…

Judging from [1], Sam Zeloof's plan might include using electron beam lithography, which scans an electron beam over a wafer surface, instead of normal photolithography. This can g…

Fun fact: you may know silver (followed by copper) is the metal with the highest electrical conductivity at room temperature, but this is only true in bulk. When a piece of metal i…

> the benefits are not as great as I think It's this one. You're probably thinking of an electrical insulator solely as a material with low conductivity. Vacuum, air, glass (SiO2) …

A fun one with easy visualization is mechanical engineering statics, in which one calculates how much something deforms from a force (e.g., a bookshelf or bridge sags, a spring str…

MEMS are awesome! Here are some other MEMS devices: - hard drive read/write heads (the platters are debatable) - inkjet printer nozzles (this is why making a DIY inkjet printer is …

The full setup is in the supplementary information (available at the bottom of the main paper website [1]), Figure 7. After this small lens, there are a couple more large lenses be…

A WiFi/BT/NFC tag system has an antenna, and a radio circuit attached to the antenna. It's almost possible to inkjet print circuitry with transistors in research applications; see …

Nope. Since most manufacturing steps are performed on an entire silicon wafer at once, the cost per chip is cheaper if there are more chips on each wafer. As a result, wafers (for …

And it turns out DIY atomic force microscopes are possible too! (e.g., [1]) It's probably less likely to get all the way to atomic resolution (0.01nm) like a scanning tunneling mic…

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24119102 ("3D Printing Integrated Circuits: What's Possible Now and in the Future?")