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Comment by alted | Hacker News Reader

A disappointing fact of chip fabrication is the minimum bar is high and expensive.

In other fields, a hobbyist can do wood/metalworking or learn programming or build a robot kit. There's an onramp for people to start learning the skills, which makes a huge ecosystem of gradually improving talent.

But in microfabrication, even though it's the only way to make chips, screens, cameras, inkjets, and LEDs, the minimum equipment cost is millions of dollars. Even worse, it takes even professionals months to fine-tune a manufacturing process to make a new thing.

As a result, R&D is much lower than it could be, and most fabrication is limited to circumstances with a high chance of mass production payoff.

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Well...

You can learn a lot by programming FPGAs.

In theory, while I think you could build an SSI manufacturing device at home if you really wanted to -- just how many people build an internal combustion engine themselves to learn about it?

This, but its really the logic function versus actual device fabrication. I would love to see a home device that would let you build you own transistors and perhaps a very small number of passives.

Consider a system that had 6mm diameter "blanks" and a tool that would let you put down an epitaxial layer, lay down, expose, and then etch a resist layer, etc. At those small scales, one could hope the chemistry would be manageable.

I think the required cleanliness goes far beyond what's easily doable with a kit.

What is the smallest feasible cleanroom for such a purpose? Can we fit a turnkey chip fab in a shipping container, hermetically sealed upon manufacture, fully automated, even pre-stocked with wafers? Drop it on a concrete pad, fill up the chemical tanks, send a spec, you have a wafer bonded to a standard package in X hours

A modern chip has one of the longest supply chains of any manufactured goods in the world. Even the biggest chip companies get the wafers made in one place, and then send them somewhere else for packaging and bonding.

It's really hard to see what benefit there might be to trying to cram all of this into a shipping container, other than to say you did it.

Cleanliness requirement is a function of feature size. For a process that has 5 µm features (that is roughly 250 times larger than current fabs) its pretty manageable. That is further improved if you use the 'cannister' technique where the "wafer" is in a sealed canister that is opened when inserted into the machine and closes automatically when pulled out.

I am envisioning a handle which ends in stainless steel holding mechanism that has the feature that when you slide it into a 'production' slot the holding mechanism pushes back to reveal the sample's surface. Think window on a floppy disk only better at keeping dust out.

6mm is pretty small (about 1/4" to be precise) in diameter. Call it 25 mm^2 of area, you're looking at, maybe, 10K "device elements" you could lay down (I'm guessing you lose a bunch of space to 3 - 8 "pads")

Your "fab" is a machine that sits on a desk, it has tanks that hold 'consumables' that are used in the process and a tank that fills with waste output. Both the empty consumables tanks and the full waste tank are shipped off to be disposed of properly.

On working side of the fab there are ports that are of the same shape as the end of your sample holder. They positively lock so you push the sample holder into the port until it "clicks" and then the machine does an evacuation cycle, followed by that step of the process.

Building a device would consist of loading your design in, then using the various ports (sometimes more than once) for different steps (add resist/render layer mask) (cure resist/rinse uncured resist off) (etch) (dope-p), (dope-n), (metal), (poly), (package).

The 'package' would always be the same shape. Think a metal can transistor from the 80's. With 8 leads and a pin 1 tab. What leads were connected would be defined by what you had programmed for your device.

You do all the steps (it would probably take anywhere from 1 to 3 days depending on the process steps you used). And the result is this part you made. Plug it into your characterization harness and verify it's function and/or signal parameters. If it fails you toss it and do another one, if it passes you have your bespoke device to use in your project.

I certainly don't see something like that having mass market appeal but I know you could sell them.

Good concept for a benchtop prototyping apparatus.

If you looked into some of the early cheap Chinese glow-pattern trinkets and musical greeting cards, the IC often looked quite "home made", having a central irregular blob of epoxy covering the fabricated device in the middle of a small square ceramic substrate. With a few not-so-thin wires coming out from under the epoxy, tieing it into the discrete components, if any.

I would imagine at the time the primary requirement was for the component to simply cost less and be way smaller than an alternative stuffed PCB, without any real need for it to be fabricated as one of the actual "chips" off of a silicon wafer.

Depending on what power of "microscope" you are willing to limit yourself to, it might not be as difficult to see microchips (or at least micro IC's) in your forseeable future.

True, using "chip on board" (COB) assembly you don't even need a package. Alignment is challenging but certainly doable.

It's not the cleanroom that's the issue, it's mostly hazardous materials and some of the processes (gas deposition, sputtering) aren't garage friendly.

That said, there are people on youtube that are doing it, and it's doable to some degree in a garage environment, but the risks of dealing with hot HF acid are too much for most of us.

Keep large quantities of Calcium Carbonate on hand?

Hopefully the people who post on hacker news. I just bought a book on steam boiler operation and another on building and maintaining internal combustion engines; so, me!

What are you going to do with the steam boiler ?

It's a research project, I am mostly self taught and I wanted to build a small archive of materials that would be enough to help a human survive the apocalypse. Farming & Animal husbandry, Metallurgy, Manufacture of goods, Pumps/engines, Electricity, a few other things.

My project is to index the volumes in the next few years and starting some of my own projects, so probably just doing some repairs on small things to start and moving on up!

> just how many people build an internal combustion engine themselves to learn about it?

At least 30 kids in Transport class when I went to high school, more if you count the kids in years before and after.

Not a full build, mind you - only some parts were cast, but we did do full strip downs and rebuilds of six cylinder ICE's as well as having a cut-away display engine in the shop.

My son did better (IMHO), he got to build an entire light aircraft over three years as part of aviation in a public high school in Western Australia. He missed out on the ICE building though.

Not if you’re Sam Zeloof: https://www.wired.com/story/22-year-old-builds-chips-parents...

(But yes, to your point, most people are not)

> Even worse, it takes even professionals months to fine-tune a manufacturing process to make a new thing.

Months for simple things. Depending on technologies and requirements, the fine-tuning (increase yield and throughput) can take years.

I think home manufacturing of chips is the next mini industrial revolution. 3D printing was the last one, I'm looking forward to seeing where we go next.

The basic process of chemical etching that the article insists is at the core of so much of our exponential progress is (still?) being taught (including practical work) in middle school though.

Never used it, but you might find https://tinytapeout.com/ interesting.

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