141–150 of 176 posts
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Well, this chap managed to make his own chips at home: http://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/ Plus an electron microscope!
Sam is super impressive, but to be fair he bought premade wafers and bought a used SEM.
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…
Making chips at home, by building the required setup from generic parts, is feasible. So is achieving nuclear fusion at home, by building a fusor. Both are educational and cool, and neither makes economical sense.
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…
yeah you are onto something. massive supply chains have a ton of carbon footprint. which some people that doesn't matter but for someone like myself, i am a bigger fan of less carbon emissions. i wonder if there is a way we can build an etching machine and print chips somehow, the process seems a little clearer after watching this simplified video. i think it can be done, everything complex is just a bunch of simple…
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They are not really that toxic. You do have to have a chemistry background and use a fume hood and a process sink with acid neutralization capability, like you find in many chem labs. Good dopant choices would be phosphorus oxychloride and oxidized boron nitride wafers. As I recollect, he started with silicon wafers with an epitaxy layer. He then did the usual oxidations, diffusions, and metallization, along with all…
Ok. I was never a process guy, but worked with some back in the day and they told me that one of their phosphorus sources was phosgene gas.
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> Maybe it wouldn't fly in the EU. May I ask why?
Because Europeans are afraid of everything. I was trying to avoid a comment that seemed politically charged but I don't know any other way to say it. I was into hobby chemistry for a while -- people trying to do anything in the EU find it almost impossible. Poland and Eastern Europe are better about it, but eh.
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Well, this chap managed to make his own chips at home: http://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/ Plus an electron microscope!
He used wafers with premade structures on it.
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…
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-...
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yeah you are onto something. massive supply chains have a ton of carbon footprint. which some people that doesn't matter but for someone like myself, i am a bigger fan of less carbon emissions. i wonder if there is a way we can build an etching machine and print chips somehow, the process seems a little clearer after watching this simplified video. i think it can be done, everything complex is just a bunch of simple…
While energy, and thus CO2, is a significant part of solar cell production (because of the sheer scale), the attributed CO2 output of the chip industry is tiny compared to the commercial value of the chips produced.
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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…
If I remember correctly, the silicon used to manufacture transistor-grade wafers is purified to roughly 10 impurities for every billion silicon atoms. Less pure starting stock might increase the cost of getting there, but probably not by too much.
>Soviet computer software and hardware designs were often on par with Western ones, but the country's persistent inability to improve manufacturing quality meant that it could not make practical use of theoretical advances. *Quality control*, in particular, was a major weakness of the Soviet computing industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_So...
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…