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0 pointsnynx4y ago0 comments

Sam is super impressive, but to be fair he bought premade wafers and bought a used SEM.

0 comments

Jeri Ellsworth has gone "deeper" into the process and made a few transistors, although at a much larger scale:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_znRopGtbE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qph8BNrnLY

To me this is far more impressive than any of the other stuff posted here. It's actually doing it rather than talking about it or faking the first 99.9% of it.

thesuitonym4y ago

Did he do his own etching? I'd say buying blank wafers would be a perfectly reasonable place to start, but if you're buying printed wafers, then you might as well buy the whole chip.

grenoire4y ago

Yeah, I don't think people will be pulling pure silicon crystals at home any time soon.

wrycoder4y ago

That’s actually quite doable in a garage, assuming you are satisfied with, say, two inch wafers. (Currently, they are approaching 18 inches!)

It’s much easier to produce silicon ingots than to do wafer fab, because of the currently tiny line widths.

But, it would make more sense to simply buy wafers (or epitaxial wafers).

Aeolun4y ago

If they do, I imagine they’d leave it at that instead of going on to make a chip.

ip264y ago

I believe he bought them with the gates etched & fets doped, and did his own metal. Something like that.

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