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Comment by tachyonbeam | Hacker News Reader

I think that making semiconductors is unfortunately out of the reach of hobbyists. You'd have to grow purified crystals (or buy them), slice and polish them, etc. The various processes needed for lithography involve toxic chemicals too AFAIK. That being said, if you want to make your own large-scale CPU, you can still build one out of discrete 74-series logic, individual transistors, or relays. Takes a lot of dedication, but that is entirely within your reach.

A fun example of a CPU built with discrete SMD transistors, the monster 6502 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQIwS2GzXLI

There's also the MegaProcessor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNa9bQRPMB8

Zusie relay computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXeBR-lbnjI

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My curriculum in school involved creating our own integrated circuits on wafers. There are lots of nasty chemicals involved, but it's not out of the reach of a dedicated hobbyist.

The biggest challenge is ion implant, which you can probably outsource to a lab.

Or you can make it in HDL and pay somebody to fab it

So what's the cheapest fab in the world?

Maybe I should just stick with FPGAs.

Wikipedia says prototype runs are done MPW or MLM, with many different chips printed on a single wafer. Nobody quotes actual prices, of course, so guess "a lot"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-project_wafer_service

https://youtu.be/Pt9i2ABe_mE

http://ifdl.jp/make_lsi/

http://hackaday.com/2016/10/13/blinking-an-led-extreme-editi...

http://www.slideshare.net/junichiakita9/intorudction-to-make...

There some projects to realize low-cost, short turn-around-time LSI fabrication at slightly old process, such as 1um, in Japan, whose name is Minimal Fab. This will enable the (commercial) LSI fabrication service at a few hundred USD cost and 1-week TAT. I believe this a revolution similar to that happened in PCB world in ten years ago.

FPGA conversion has a 50k nre. Anything else and you need a team of people on your end to do things like verify quality.

The fun part is that you can sometimes sneak an trial design into a shuttle service. ( but good luck making that initial design!)

These do multi-project wafers (aka shuttle runs):

https://www.mosis.com/

http://www.europractice-ic.com/

No worries, I heard this guy on an electronics podcast predicting that we'd all have chip printers. It's only a matter of time…right?

Startup idea!

A guy on hackaday.io ygdes IIRC (https://hackaday.io/whygee) does a lot of these, even changing designs (somehow having async memory access at the arch level)

IIUC he worked in the cpu business in the past but is too idealist to enjoy doing it now.

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