22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

1. Find a job where you have a workspace or a lab to tinker in.

2. Find a makerspace/hackerspace in your neighborhood.

It'd have to be a really clean garage tho

or any similar Shenzhen special. Buy bigger over smaller.

Buy, don't build. There will be a handful of recommendations for the Opulo Lumen/OpenPNP: avoid them. Avoid everything but ballscrew designs: you will spend an annoying amount of time trying to calibrate a belt-driven design and calibration will never stick.

Please, do not make the mistake I did: get something with CL feeders, make this investment. Drag feeders are not good - they are slow and the stylus will violently shake parts out of reels (or you'll spend time calibrating it to try and avoid this issue - don't waste the time.) Get something that can do 0201, even if you don't use it.

Ideally, get something that uses a separate, commodity host machine.

Mold making is a difficult science of itself. I can’t point you in a general direction beyond what worked for me. I started with OpenSCAD then moved to FreeCAD then eventually ended up with Fusion360. You need to have a vision for what you want to make, or else you won’t follow through till the end with learning. There is some dude from Texas who wrote a textbook on the subject that was invaluable for me in learning how to design oxygenation and cooling techniques. This is hardcore industrial engineering stuff, the kind of thing that you don’t casually do.if you’re trying to learn and do this yourself you need to not be afraid of doing some applied physics.

There was a lot of crying and pain and trial and error for me to teach myself. If you know what you want I would instead go on fiverr or its equivalent of the day and hire yourself an actual mold designer and save yourself 90% of the pain and heartache that I went through. Mold designers are weirdly cheap for the insane amount of expertise they offer

Printing the mold is another heartache of itself. I used anycubic photon with a flex plate and Sriraya resin. That was a journey all by itself - I originally started with insanely expensive Formlabs stuff before getting to the Anycubic solution. Again it took a lot of crying and trial and error to get it right. But it costs a mere fraction of what it costs to do it the normal way at least

https://jlcpcb.com/blog/4-Free-Assembly-for-Your-PCB

The GP commenter also wrote about a price "per unit":

> get some reasonably complex fully assembled prototype boards shipped to me in a week or two for $5-20 USD per unit.

So whilst not quite garage ready we’re probably 2-5 years of you being able to order completely custom silicon form the likes of PCBway and have it shipped in the matter of days rather than months.

At the time I saw some of Sam's videos (I think I originally found them here on HN), and I had a big question: If a hobbyist can build 1970's era chips for ~$10k in his garage, and Intel can build 2020's era chips for ~$10B in state-of-the-art factories, why doesn't someone start a startup building 1990's era chips in a ~$10M facility?

I'd assume Atomic Semi is that startup :)

Ive been looking for almost 5 months for an entry level hardware job (preferably in SF, but willing to relocate anywhere), and 100k is about what Im looking for based on what Ive seen.

Some go as low as 85, and some start at 120, but 100k is pretty standard.

The salaries are not what they were in 2021

I hope to learn enough Verilog/VHDL/RTL to take advantage of the Free Shuttle program they have[1] eventually.

Currently, I'm wondering how to go from expressions to code I can load into a bitgrid. The thought of parsing code, building an AST, converting that to an acyclic directed graph of binary expressions, to actual bits to load the grid with.... overwhelms me, and has me putting it off. 8(

I do have a working simulator, written in Pascal[2], that can run fairly quickly for toy problems on my desktop PC. So, there's been some progress.

I strongly suspect I can get there, but need an accountability buddy to push me along. I used to be a self starter, but I stayed in an IT Admin job too long that crushed it out of me.

[1] https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program

[2] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

They're amazing if you love sitting in traffic.

Not many, same distribution would apply to that population. Most would scroll tiktok in a larger house.

"""I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.""" - Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History, 1980

World population has increased 60% since then, while extreme poverty decreased 66% in absolute (not relative) terms.

So, what I think would happen with more space, is that we would find the next limit, while mistaking the growth that improved conditions lead to as the natural state of affairs.

Personally I'm fine with that, but I get why people might have an aesthetic issue with it. They're of course allowed to compromise on one of the other 2 points to get a better looking neighborhood if they want.

It doesn't even have to be own space... just places like repair shops that let you hang around, maker/hacker spaces would go a long way.

I learned / had so much fun just hanging out at "Radio"(/TV/Tape recorder) Repair shops when I was a kid. Of course most of things i built back there were silly things like lights for my bicycle, longer earphone wires etc... But it is a valuable experience for me.

This was pretty interesting to me as a chemist, and there were even more parallels once I went to work for a company specializing in emerging chemicals, where unending experimentation and innovation was essential to bring yields up to tolerable levels from starting points which were barely feasible. Similar to emerging semiconductor processes.

With all the effort Zeloof has put in, apparently single-handedly for the most part, in his garage he does have what looks like a more advanced facility now than they had then. With the ability to make repairs and do maintenance on the comercially available equipment of the time, to a degree and with determination that the leading professors did not even usually possess.

This is the kind of person that needs to be protected from potential disasters that could derail his continuous progress, especially with such an early head-start.

Very much of an outlier, but there are uncountable others who have always had to wait for the least bit of opportunity which never arose in any realistic way.

Being able to start small and informally allows many more businesses to start.