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22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

wired.com

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Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#71

Post by astura »

Avamander wrote: post #24
xor99 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One of Zeloof’s best finds was a broken electron microscope that cost $250,000 in the early ’90s; he bought it for $1,000 and repaired it."

A thousand dollars is an achievable amount of money for a smart kid in a poor family. I have had good friends from really poor families in Europe make more from bug bounty programs. If that's you're trying imply.

No, It's not.

I was a poor kid and didn't get financial support from my parents in young adulthood/college. I couldn't even fathom spending $1,000 on non-essential expenses during college. I was living entirely on student loans and minimum wage summer jobs - When that's your life you can't think about anything but pure survival. It's an entirely different mindset that I have now as a financially secure person.

If I got a $1,000 windfall during college it would go straight to bills/food. It would be entirely unfathomable to spend it on anything else. $1,000 is more than my monthly income during my college years.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#73

Post by tyingq »

phkahler wrote: post #70
moring wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad wording on my part. I meant a market for ultra-low-volume fabbing of your own chip designs, not of fixed designs.

Are PLDs still a thing? They can implement most anything a really low density chip like this could.

Perhaps analog ICs would be a better market?

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#74

Post by b112 »

vostok wrote: post #68
b112 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments do, if they work on bombs. Or spying. Or on figuring out the other guy's bombs.

Do you have a source for this? Spying sounds like a pretty interesting job if you can make something similar to FANG.

Algo coders, predictive analysis of publicly available data, large societal trends prediction, using social media data to detect malign intent prior to action, analyzing the same to look for foreign activity, hacking foreign infrastructure, etc etc, CIA/NSA and other agencies hire these types right from University typically.

They also fund startups which may be used for national interests and so on.

Much of the time, they contact you, not the other way around.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#75

Post by moring »

phkahler wrote: post #70
moring wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad wording on my part. I meant a market for ultra-low-volume fabbing of your own chip designs, not of fixed designs.

Are PLDs still a thing? They can implement most anything a really low density chip like this could.

PLDs evolved to FPGAs, which are far more powerful for that price. Homegrown chips would only be interesting for someone who regards ASIC design as an end, not a means, hence hobbyists.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#78

Post by tagoregrtst »

Registration wall.

Does the article say what he does with HF? Ive often thought home brew chip making at 70s scale would just be a lot of elbow grease, but definitely doable. Safety is not that hard. Chemicals not that bad. Nothing that American garage tinkerers haven't dealt with before (my favorite, tin can turbine)

Except for the HF. Ill admit I dont know much about HF, I used it only once in a lab (making BJTs) but: HF is nasty dangerous, impossible (?) to get without a license, impossible to dispose properly.

Is there an alternative to etch SiO2 or is this guy on the edge of legal and insane?

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#79

Post by pyb »

danielrpa wrote: post #10

Amazing! "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.

There is a currently a window of opportunity to hire Sam before FAANG does.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage

#80

Post by tagoregrtst »

andi999 wrote: post #76
Wronnay wrote: post #72

He could make a business out of that by replicating retro chips. Some chips are not easy to get and I bet vintage computing fans would pay enough so that a business in that area could be profitable.

Copyright might be a problem.

Thats an interesting comment.

IANAL but

The patent, how you’d typically protect the chips, have long expired.

But the chip could have been protected as a work of art under copyright.

However that would cover only a very similar layout of the transistors. Functionally identical chips wouldn't be covered even if they weren’t re-created from scratch.

Didnt Nintendo do something similar with the MOS6502?

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