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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.
The hilarity illustrates an important point. We never just make a thing. A recipe or blueprint is a convenient fiction. Rather we participate in a dynamic evolving process which itself evolved through many cycles of copying, repetition and debugging. Even the first version wasn't strictly original because the idea was borrowed from elsewhere. 'Oh you work at the olive press. How would you like a job with this new-fan…
You might not do great to start with computers, and instead, do better to start from the dawn of civilization. https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ What I got from this is that I could make homemade coal by myself, MAYBE. I don't know if there's any climate on Earth where I could eek out a net energy return on primitive crops. If there was no one telling me what to do, I would surely starve in early agricultural ti…
https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page also feels relevant
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.
Suppose I want to make a custom ASIC with 20B transistors. I have a lot of money to spend but no semiconductor experience. How do I go about hiring good chip designers? How much $ should I realistically expect to spend on design, verification, and fabrication, respectively? I've heard $20M is the ballpark for a mask on a leading edge node. What is the marginal cost per CPU?
I'm going to guess at a number and say you're probably looking at $10-20MM all in.
As far as hiring good designers, you really need the relevant technical background to screen them. Assuming you need a team, I would suggest starting with someone in a director position at a large company with experience in your area of interest. They would be able to more concretely define the project and determine human resource requirements/allocation.
If your ASIC is just large but not complex (meaning lots of repeated structures), and you can get away with just a few strong designers, I would suggest hiring a consultant to help you define the project and screen candidates. EE profs at your local university might be a good start.
Feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile) if you want to describe your project in more depth and I'd be happy to offer what advice I can.
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Sam is super impressive, but to be fair he bought premade wafers and bought a used SEM.
Did he do his own etching? I'd say buying blank wafers would be a perfectly reasonable place to start, but if you're buying printed wafers, then you might as well buy the whole chip.
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…
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.
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No, I don't think so. But it's not because of the chemicals or machines. There's not really any demand for it. Most hobbyist "ICs" are fully digital and can already be realized on an FPGA. For simpler applications, you can probably program a microcontroller to do what you want. Integrated circuits are appealing to industry because they're integrated - they can be smaller and they reduce cost (long term; still need th…
Yeah, I saw and am amazed by his work, which made me wonder whether chip manufacturing could get as streamlined, compact and mainstream as 3d printing is today!
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.
Is it possible to embed optic fibers and optoelectronic gates along with semiconductor gates? How is the fabrication process different? Probably there are size limitations due to fiber width and paths?
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…
The main issue is creating the masks. I'm not sure where you would get rubylith and the associated machinery for contact printing in this day and age.
As a side note: the thing stopping commodity VLSI is the CAD tools, not the silicon. Silicon runs are around $50K or so for an old node and Fab Shuttle/MPW(multi-project wafer) runs are often under $10K.