Beating the fabs at their own game? Not likely. But maybe another game, probably.
I imagine you could put down a "wire" of metal atoms without too much trouble. Something like a capacitor shouldn't be too difficult if you could put down a dielectric.
Not sure about how to do a transistor - maybe there could be an alternative "switch".
Yeah, I'm hand-waving. And maybe the metal substrate an STM uses is a non-starter.
But still, atomic precision seems to be in hobbyists reach and I imagine SOME approach to low volume tiny circuits are possible that would not be economically viable in terms of RnD and fab for "big silicon".
STMs are very limited though. The kinds of atoms you can pick up are pretty limited afaik.
Give it a couple of years, maybe 5-10, and there will probably be hobbyists moving atoms around. The industry and academia will, of course, probably be further along.
I remember reading a book about organic farming that made a great point:
(paraphrasing)
As a home organic gardener you might think that you can't compete with a commercial farmer, but... Say you want to make a tomato dish. You want the most succulent tomato with the softest skin. The commercial farmer needs to choose a variety that has a skin though enough to pick mechanically or by rough hands.
At home you can go as soft as you want to. You can pick it and cook immediately.
The commercial farmer needs to use a variety that can be picked green and ripened.
Etc.
Different scale, different constraints, different opportunities.
Hah! Imagining what die size a 40μm process might need to make a CPU. The Intel 8008 (1972) was 10μm.
The above is moving to electronic, but paper still has advantages over electronics so it isn't dead.
I’m hoping for an open source implementation that can be backed by a company or crowdsourced, manufactured at scale and auditioned by the community.
This could happen this decade and would be transformative.
Heck, even being capable of printing replacements for 6581/8580 (SID - sound chip from Commodore 64) or 6526 (IO chips used in the C64 and others that were notorious for burning out) would get a whole lot of retro-enthusiasts excited, as there are a bunch of FPGA reproductions of the SID which are way overkill.
Doing that would be possible by matching processes that were getting dated by 1980...
As for manufacturing, I think it's harder but not crazy harder. Small batch fabs making small vendors' customized implementations seems reasonable. It's really about reducing requirements for big scale. ISA is one.