131–136 of 136 posts
Is this kind of thing possible with less toxic chemistry?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As mentioned in other posts, the process of making these types of devices tend to produce rounded structures. This is a byproduct of using Ion beams, deposition, lithography, etc in manufacture. BUT, the image is also made worse by how the image is captured. The picture you are looking at is a FIB (Focused Ion Beam) cut cross-section of a transistor which is then imaged by a SEM (scanning electron microscope). Probab…
>"As mentioned in other posts, the process of making these types of devices tend to produce rounded structures. This is a byproduct of using Ion beams, deposition, lithography, etc in manufacture." Thanks for the detailed response. Might you have a link to one of those other posts or some other resources that talks about how these processes tend to produce rounded structures?
This is all very interesting and amazing, and kudos to the person for being able to do this - but I think we need to take a step back here a bit; this doesn't look like something that "just anybody" could replicate. For one, this person seems to have some very advanced knowledge of some very advanced processes - I am not even sure where one would gain such knowledge from easily, though they do seem to have access to…
He was in high school when he did this in his parents garage.
and their bank account...
which is not to diminish his accomplishments. It's impressive as hell what he has managed to do, but it's kinda hard to overlook that detail.
A project like this would be impossible for the vast majority of the population of the richest country in the world, even for adults with a college degree. Besides the cost, the time investment required for a hobby like this is huge, and what you produce would be effectively worthless in 2019 (financially, at least).
I was at Semicon Japan last year in December and I learn about the coolest semiconductor company (non profit research organization) ever - MinimalFab [1]. There isn't much information their website but this [2] video explains what MinimalFab is about. Essentially, it is a cleanroom-free, modularized fab where each process step in a fab is like a little ATM machine. Miniaturization of complex fab processes is mind blo…
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>"This. Every step in fabrication has limits on its resolution beyond the resolution of the machine exposing the polymer resist." I didn't quite understand what you meant here. Could you elaborate on this? What are some of those limits? >"These things are very small and if we could make the corners sharper, that would remove one major barrier to making them even smaller. And then they wouldn't look so tidy anymore."…
I just meant that if you make your imperfections smaller, but then make the whole system smaller to take advantage of that, and then zoom in on it, the imperfections look just as significant, relative to the whole, as before when everything was bigger. A few factors: There's always some finite transition region between the fully-exposed area and the fully-unexposed area of the polymer resist area. With optical lithog…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was in high school when he did this in his parents garage.
> in his parents garage. and their bank account... which is not to diminish his accomplishments. It's impressive as hell what he has managed to do, but it's kinda hard to overlook that detail. A project like this would be impossible for the vast majority of the population of the richest country in the world, even for adults with a college degree. Besides the cost, the time investment required for a hobby like this is…