22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
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Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#2Past related threads. Others?
A home-made lithographically-fabricated integrated circuit (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28263714 - Aug 2021 (13 comments)
DIY Silicon: Man Builds Integrated Circuit That's Similar to Intel's 4004 CPU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28208614 - Aug 2021 (6 comments)
Making 100 transistors silicon integrated circuit chips in your garage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28179241 - Aug 2021 (8 comments)
Second IC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28176255 - Aug 2021 (79 comments)
Homemade IC (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21239145 - Oct 2019 (40 comments)
Home Chip Fab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20657398 - Aug 2019 (131 comments)
First integrated circuit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18118559 - Oct 2018 (1 comment)
First IC :) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957545 - April 2018 (1 comment)
A home-made lithographically-fabricated integrated circuit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16955549 - April 2018 (116 comments)
First made-at-home integrated circuits using litography - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16953921 - April 2018 (1 comment)
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#3Does anyone have an idea whether there is a potential hobbyist market for home-grown chips of this size? I know that I would definitely be willing to spend around $100 for a much smaller chip, like quad-gates or slightly above (1200 transistors is way beyond what I thought is possible in a garage), more the larger the chip gets, and ultimately including getting involved in the design of the chip -- but then of course paying for all failures resulting from that.
The upside, compared to things like Europractice or MOSIS being lower one-time costs and lower turnaround time, but higher per-chip costs, which matches very well with the "hobbyist" target.
I long thought that this would be a nice niche market, but I never found any clue about whether these are realistic numbers or if anyone else would be interested in that.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#4Zeloof's latest video: Z2 - Upgraded Homemade Silicon Chips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg
unpaywalled Wired story: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%...
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#5No post body was provided.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#6Heh, I'll bet the makers of Photoshop never saw this usecase of their software coming. What a great project.
The registration headaches must be considerable, he needs to re-place the die in exactly the same spot for every pass of exposure.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#7Does anyone have an idea whether there is a potential hobbyist market for home-grown chips of this size? I know that I would definitely be willing to spend around $100 for a much smaller chip, like quad-gates or slightly above (1200 transistors is way beyond what I thought is possible in a garage), more the larger the chip gets, and ultimately including getting involved in the design of the chip -- but then of course…
> 1200 transistors is way beyond what I thought is possible in a garage
what (prior) breakthroughs enabled Zeloof to achieve this?
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#8Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#9No post body was provided.
Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
#10Amazing!
"Zeloof says he doesn’t know for sure what he wants to do after graduating this spring" - I hope we don't hear later that he went to work for FAANG. One the saddest things about Big Tech is how they take young talent away from innovative, potentially competing enterprises and into busy work internal projects just because they can.