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22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

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Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

#41
post #24
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m constantly surprised how tech folks seem to undervalue the suburbs.

Most American suburbs are awful if you enjoy any sort of regular physical activity, and simply prefer to walk to the market instead of drive. They're amazing if you love sitting in traffic.

Silicon Valley is great for running and biking. Just look at Rancho San Antonio for example.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Your comment seems unnecessarily antagonistic. Given whatever size of garage I have, being somewhere I can live without a car gives me more garage space, regardless of whether it's a suburb. If I want to maximize garage space given my choice of a car-free lifestyle, I would probably move to a suburb with a good train station, not one where "only 20 minutes' drive to downtown" is seen as the selling point. Those are s…

Nah, I'm joking, hopefully not antagonizing. My point was that since you're not downtown, you can park in the street. Minutes to downtown isn't a selling point I'm making. I don't typically go downtown. I've put 10k miles on my car in 3 years. This was in response to someone saying they can't get exercise in a suburb, which I find absurd.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Live somewhere cheaper and you can make enough to have a garage by painting houses or mowing lawns.

Not in Australia. Even rural is expensive.

How about the following list of 10 cities/towns in Australia with property around 100-300k AUD?

https://www.mpamag.com/au/mortgage-industry/guides/what-are-...

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

#44
post #10

I hope he doesn't have to work these hours. That would be awful, even if you loved it. The risk of burnout would be very high, and not reasonable for such a profoundly knowledgeable resource. "We all take two years to develop one generation, how come you guys can do it in one or one-and-a-half year?" And they asked if some of your customer transfer technology to you or what not? And I told him, "No," I told him that,…

“Find something you love and you won’t work any day in your life”.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

#45
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most American suburbs are awful if you enjoy any sort of regular physical activity, and simply prefer to walk to the market instead of drive. They're amazing if you love sitting in traffic.

I'm in a suburb. Not an expensive one. Downtown is a 20 minute drive in light traffic. Within a 10 minute walk there are office buildings, grocery stores, shopping mall, gyms, parks, hiking and biking trails, etc. There are many cities to choose from; some are better planned than others. Based on your comment I would guess that you've opted to live in one of the "cool" cities in America.

Which city are you in?

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Your comment seems unnecessarily antagonistic. Given whatever size of garage I have, being somewhere I can live without a car gives me more garage space, regardless of whether it's a suburb. If I want to maximize garage space given my choice of a car-free lifestyle, I would probably move to a suburb with a good train station, not one where "only 20 minutes' drive to downtown" is seen as the selling point. Those are s…

You don't need to park the car in the garage you know. Park the car on the drive, keep the garage for a workshop.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

#47
post #28
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some past discussion suggested there was an opportunity for very low volume production at much lower cost because the method doesn't use masks.

There’s no way it’s lower cost. However what it could be is guaranteed line capacity and delivery dates. And if you’re doing small orders from a large foundry you don’t get that. Those things have value too and someone might be willing to pay a bit extra to get them. My main issue is semiconductor lines are fragile beasts that need constant tinkering. So if the system requires full time staff to keep running, that’s…

If a mask set is 50 million and you only need ten chips, these guys would only need to come in under 5 million per chip to win on cost.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

#48

I have a feeling that making chips at home will require the ditching of silicon based technology. Yes, this will be accompanied by performance loss. Perhaps organic semiconductors have less complicated processes. Or techniques like molecular self assembly, nano imprinting, etc.

Yes, perhaps making electronics out of self-assembling molecules is a less complicated process than photolithography.

Re: 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

#50

It really is wild what you can do in your garage these days. Since the early 2010’s there has been a true revolution in this space that has only accelerated over the last few years. I have an injection molding machine that I built in my garage for less than $1500 USD that has a 3 cubic inch injection volume, able to make a large variety of plastic components at small production scale using a mold I printed from my $5…

May I ask how you do this, specifically? What machine do you use for injection molding, and how do you make the moulds? Very interested in doing this myself. (Also interested in specific recommendations for a desktop pick n place if anyone has some)

I built a buster beagle. YouTube has a bunch of great guides from him plus what to buy.

Mold making is a difficult science of itself. I can’t point you in a general direction beyond what worked for me. I started with OpenSCAD then moved to FreeCAD then eventually ended up with Fusion360. You need to have a vision for what you want to make, or else you won’t follow through till the end with learning. There is some dude from Texas who wrote a textbook on the subject that was invaluable for me in learning how to design oxygenation and cooling techniques. This is hardcore industrial engineering stuff, the kind of thing that you don’t casually do.if you’re trying to learn and do this yourself you need to not be afraid of doing some applied physics.

There was a lot of crying and pain and trial and error for me to teach myself. If you know what you want I would instead go on fiverr or its equivalent of the day and hire yourself an actual mold designer and save yourself 90% of the pain and heartache that I went through. Mold designers are weirdly cheap for the insane amount of expertise they offer

Printing the mold is another heartache of itself. I used anycubic photon with a flex plate and Sriraya resin. That was a journey all by itself - I originally started with insanely expensive Formlabs stuff before getting to the Anycubic solution. Again it took a lot of crying and trial and error to get it right. But it costs a mere fraction of what it costs to do it the normal way at least

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