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You’re not sure if someone building a RAM clean room in a shed is appropriate for HackerNews, literally “news for nerds”? A dictionary purchase may be warranted
Yeah but it's a YouTube video. Those tend not to do super well on the front page.
I'm not sure this is what they meant when they said they wanted to bring manufacturing back to the USA lol
Jokes aside, seeing as this person has created their own clean room in a shed, and is making RAM, what exactly is stopping any company from doing this themselves and breaking into the RAM business? I'd pay less for RAM that wasn't "certified" in some official way, at least it works.
The real problem with the RAM business is that it was commodified; normally manufacturers make a relatively small margin. No incentive to build a factory for that. These are not normal times because (a) someone has bought all the RAM and (b) someone has blown up a whole load of globally critical infrastructure in the Middle East.
The risk the existing RAM manufacturers are being cautious about is the risk of normal: if you start building a factory now, will you be selling into a RAM glut?
I saw this video yesterday and considered posting it, but I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate for HN. This channel has another video where it shows how the clean room lab is created starting from a basic backyard shed, and that was truly astounding. The positive pressure to keep the number of particles low in someone’s backyard is almost mystical to me.
Recently I saw a post about Bonsai trees on the front page. Making your own RAM is 100% more relevant to HN than quite a few posts I see on the main page.
So, I get that we charge the capacitor up, and that it leaks so we must recharge it periodically. I don't get two things: 1. How is the value read? Is it reading the leak? 2. How is recharging done? I guess the leak itself (assuming my guess in 1. holds) could provide charge for some logic that checks "if has charge then recharge else nop". I still don't really get transistors :P, but this was cool.
The important bits here are:
- any two conductive plates close together with an insulator between make a capacitor (1)
- when a capacitor is charged, the energy goes into the electric FIELD
- that's the FIELD of the field effect transistor
- if the field is strong enough, that causes conduction between source and drain (along the "channel")
- the insulator is nanometers thick, so current leaks across it; at that scale, you can detect individual electrons quantum teleporting straight through it.
(1) technically like gravity there is a capacitance between any two objects in the universe, but it's only significant when you have relatively wide and close conductors
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Admit it, deep down, our inner engeering child also wants to build a semiconductor clean room ;)
I do but my days in the fab taught me that you do NOT want people to do this, considering the extremely dangerous chemicals involved. People have died changing EMPTY tanks of phosphine gas used for doping… and HF acid used for etch is another nightmare entirely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Admit it, deep down, our inner engeering child also wants to build a semiconductor clean room ;)
I do but my days in the fab taught me that you do NOT want people to do this, considering the extremely dangerous chemicals involved. People have died changing EMPTY tanks of phosphine gas used for doping… and HF acid used for etch is another nightmare entirely.
Considering how AI companies and older hardware manufacturing companies are driving up the RAM prices - thus, milking all of us ultimately - I think 3D printing needs to become the new default. And affordable too, eventually (it already is, for cheap things, e. g. plastics or PLA based printing, this is often much cheaper than ordering this from a company, but I mean with regards to computer systems too. Naturally ri…
I only buy free-range artisanal DRAM at the DRAM farmer's market.
Did anyone forget that core memory is woven ? With knitting, beads and everything ? https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3173574.3174105
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do but my days in the fab taught me that you do NOT want people to do this, considering the extremely dangerous chemicals involved. People have died changing EMPTY tanks of phosphine gas used for doping… and HF acid used for etch is another nightmare entirely.
Honest question, is there a way to run the entire process acid-free?