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Comment by bhhaskin | Hacker News Reader

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bhhaskin

Only if you put up the 10 billion dollars.

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Machines are less than 400 million.

And the cost of the people to run those machines, and the factories that are required to run the machines?

Dont forget RAM.

I'll do it for free. And I'm sure we could rent a facility.

I think you are vastly underestimating how a modern fab works. The average cost is 10 billion and takes a about 10 years to build. They are very complex and even the slightest issue can ruin yields. There is a reason why there are so few.

Yeah you're right. I was way off.

Why is your bitcoin donation still active then?

You're just talking about a lithography machine. Patterning is one step out of thousands in a modern process (albeit an important one). There's plenty more stuff needed for a production line, this isn't a 3D printer but for chips. And that's just for the FEOL stuff, then you still need to do BEOL :). And packaging. And testing (accelerated/environmental, too). And failure analysis. And...

Also, you know, there's a whole process you'll need to develop. So prepare to be not making money (but spending tons of it on running the lines) until you have a well tested PDK.

> 3D printer but for chips

how about a farm of electron microscopes? these should work

Canon has been working on an alternative to EUV lithography called nanoimprint lithography. It would be a bit closer to the idea of having an inkjet printer make the masks to etch the wafers. It hasn't been proven in scale and there's a lot of thinking this won't really be useful, but it's neat to see and maybe the detractors are wrong.

https://global.canon/en/technology/nil-2023.html

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/nanoimprint-lithograph...

They'll still probably require a good bit of operator and designer knowledge to work around whatever rough edges exist in the technology to keep yields high, assuming it works. It's still not a "plug it in, feed it blank wafers, press PRINT, and out comes finished chips!" kind of machine some here seem to think exist.

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