121–130 of 176 posts
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If you knew enough VHDL you can make your own digital chips including CPUs using off the shelf FPGAs... https://blog.classycode.com/implementing-a-cpu-in-vhdl-part-...
Yeah, certainly true, but FPGAs are beholden to the same supply chain. This doesn’t fix the issue at all.
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Can you talk about if the US has microchip supremacy due to raw materials from Spuce Pine's pure silicon, and if there are any sources that are almost as good or being used instead? Is it almost like De Beer's diamond monopoly? Do you use any countries or specific factories that do better refinement or are the raw materials directly shipped to the manufacturing country? What do you make from the wafers usually? Are c…
The US may have technological supremacy when it comes to design and the resultant products, but it lags behind in terms of actually manufacturing semiconductors. The dominant players are in Asia (TSMC, Samsung, GF) and Europe (GF). Intel has their own fabs, but they are currently behind the competition, and up until very recently only fabricated their own products. There are a lot of other companies in the industry w…
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That sounds way too high for mask costs. You're definitely looking at 7 figures, but I don't think they've yet hit 8. Unfortunately the answer to all of your budget questions is: it depends. It's going to scale with the complexity of your requirements. Something like a custom ARM chip with heavily custom machine learning and signal processing, high speed clocking, etc, would probably need a decent sized team and a fe…
> That sounds way too high for mask costs. You're definitely looking at 7 figures, but I don't think they've yet hit 8. 7nm logic mask set costs are estimated at $10.5M. Of course you could always use a slightly less leading-edge node and save a lot of money. Slide 13: https://semiwiki.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Lithovision-...
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Can you talk about if the US has microchip supremacy due to raw materials from Spuce Pine's pure silicon, and if there are any sources that are almost as good or being used instead? Is it almost like De Beer's diamond monopoly? Do you use any countries or specific factories that do better refinement or are the raw materials directly shipped to the manufacturing country? What do you make from the wafers usually? Are c…
I’d never heard of Spruce Pine, interesting. I wasn’t able to read the wired article but another article said it wasn’t the silica/silicon that’s the world-beater there though, it’s the quartz for use in crucibles etc? Also - does the US really have microchip supremacy? The highest tech fabs are non-us (Samsung and TSMC)
Circuit designer here - feel free to ask any questions about the manufacturing process, design etc. Having a thorough understanding of the process, I thought this was hilarious. But if you really want to understand the process, it's pretty terrible. It spends 10 steps on making a wafer, and then the bulk of the actual process is condensed to 16.
When designing circuits, I cannot imagine you lay everything out by hand. Do you have specific sets of pre-made circuits/connections that you just kind of copy paste all over depending on the desired functionality of the chip?
For large digital circuits (e.g. CPUs), it's all automated. There's a lot of human involvement, but ultimately a computer is placing all the transistors and wiring them together.
Gave up on step 3: purify. Glad I did: each step after got more and more ridiculous.
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My brother and several of his friends do this for a living at Intel. Most of them have Electrical Engineering PhDs, though I believe one is a Chemical Engineer. My brother's thesis specifically was in 2d transistor design and worked under a Material Science professor. I believe most universities have professors who teach Semiconductors classes, whether it is under the name Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering…
> Downside of this field is that there are very few job opportunities without relocating. If you're in the US, you can work at Intel... or Intel. Unless you're willing to move to Taiwan and work at TSMC. Only if we're talking specifically about cutting edge logic. There's Texas Instruments and GlobalFoundries in the US on the trailing edge for logic. In memory, where the fabrication techniques are similar, there's Mi…
I guess the point I was trying to make in my trite (and I admit, inaccurate) statement was that it's not as accessible of a career path as, say, coding. It's more like becoming a rocket scientist: there are very few companies to pick from in that field. And they're not typically in the same place geographically.
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The author misleads you with a point I brought up, it is not possible without globaliziation providing essential raw materials components that have no replacement unless that is your local environment. Spruce Pine has silicon that gives the US microchip supremacy that has dominated for the entire duration of manufacturing. It will never be commoditized that you can take off the shelf raw materials from anywhere local…
I don't think it's inherent that doped silicon will stay the dominant microelectronics substrate and I think it's plausible that people will find new ways to grow it that don't require excellent raw materials.
However, it is plausible to not rely too much on microchips in general, a pot can control fan speed with older motors, but we lose brushless fans. You may really enjoy post collapse guides if you are interested in what can be made locally.
http://www.survivorlibrary.com/
There are great youtube videos on like primative technology as well that makes things from scratch, even steel cannot be made locally without the proper materials so there needs to be some sort of global/larger community unless they live in a resource rich environment (the US does not have metals like Eurasia does).
It'd be really awesome if microprocessors, even at a low-end process node like 130 nm, could be made with room-sized machines or smaller. There's a lot of space for companies wanted to manufacture their own MCUs, for instance, without relying on massive supply chains. I think this'll happen at some point, as silicon manufacturing hits final roadblocks and becomes increasingly commoditized, but it'd be nice if it were…
Both are educational and cool, and neither makes economical sense.