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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

> but surely we could get to ~10um.

Well, why not 100um then? It's still way better than discrete components.

I’m convinced this is the way to go. Rather than imitating commercial fab techniques, let’s find something that works without the toxic chemistry or vacuum chambers, even if it’s janky at first. 3D printers were janky at first too.

If you could fit even 9 logic gates into 1 square mm with a construction mechanism that scaled up to 2cm by 2cm you could build a rather capable 8-bit CPU.

I do wonder if taking this approach would work better with a novel construction method. Lithography and nasty chemicals are easier for resolution, but nasty chemicals.

On the other hand there will always be someone standing by to tell you an FPGA could have done that.

And someone next to them saying there's a chip that already does that, with someone standing next to them holding a commercial product that does the thing, and someone next to them tell everybody it's all a waste of time.

Someone's going to judge what you do regardless. As long as you're not hurting someone else, go build what you want to build, others be damned.

Totally agree. As creator of a lot of projects where people have asked "Why would you even do that". I wholly encourage build and be damned.

I've done

    Pacman in DCPU-16 asm
    A HTML/JS desktop environment
    8-bit AVR assembler in JavaScript
    An 8-bit fantasy console with web IDE.

and whatever the hell https://c50.fingswotidun.com/ is

plus a bunch of other things that really make people wonder if I have any sort of life plan at all.

100 um is 4mil, which is the resolution one can get from the cheapest PCB offerings. (e.g. for single digit $ from JLCPCB).

> 100 um is 4mil

Just checking, "4mil"? When I see (or hear) "mil" I assume millimeters, which clearly isn't right here, but I don't know if this is autocorrupt or if this is shorthand for something else I've never seen called this before, say "1e-4 meters"?

USAmericans will do anything to avoid using the metric system. To them, "mil" means "milli-inch".

A mil in manufacturing is 0.001 inches(in this case 100um =3.937mil).

mil is an unfortunate shorthand for one-thousandth of an inch widely used in the electronics industry.

mil in this context is 1/1000 inch

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