[HN Gopher] Hacker Fab
___________________________________________________________________
Hacker Fab
Author : ipnon
Score : 274 points
Date : 2024-11-05 14:59 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.hackerfab.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.hackerfab.org)
| Tepix wrote:
| Looks like it costs slightly above $50,000 just in hardware
| devices to setup such a Hacker Lab. Here's hoping costs will come
| down some more soon.
| atrus wrote:
| I mean, all things considered that feels pretty cheap for a mix
| of _new_ and diy equipment to do this.
| nxobject wrote:
| With luck, as a pedagogical tool it'll be accessible to
| academic institutions all over the world with $50k, at least. I
| hope this effort succeeds, but I don't know about the catches
| involved here.
| zusammen wrote:
| That's still a massive sum by academic standards.
| Administrators can afford expenses of that size, but
| educators will balk.
| kragen wrote:
| That's roughly one year of tuition for one student at most
| US universities.
| cweagans wrote:
| How much is custom silicon from an established fab for the
| average person? I suspect that even a small run would be more
| than $50k, but I don't have any point of reference.
| andrewla wrote:
| When we saw a rise in 3d printing, I was very hopeful that a
| hobbyist movement towards fabricating large-feature ICs would
| soon arise. Nobody's doing 4nm fabrication in their garage, I
| reasoned, but surely we could get to ~10um.
|
| As I read more about the dark art of IC fabrication, though, I
| realized that even this was a faint dream. I had imagined a world
| of lasers carving troughs, and print heads carefully placing down
| the lines and doping the silicon, an elegant symphony of modern
| technology.
|
| But the real world is much messier -- every stage involves
| dangerous and toxic chemicals, processes that are spoiled by a
| spec of dust in the wrong place, either causing a cascade of
| reagent failures or a physical impediment to correctness;
| distressingly analog and oh so messy and built by trial and error
| and refined by domain experts in ways that are intensely hard to
| replicate because all the same lessons need to be learned again
| each time.
|
| I'm glad to see the work being done here for hobbyist
| fabrication, but barring huge leaps and bounds, the gap between
| the neat lines in Magic and the shiny silicon discs is a vast
| chasm owned by the material scientists, not the electrical
| engineers or the software engineers.
| foobarian wrote:
| > but surely we could get to ~10um.
|
| Well, why not 100um then? It's still way better than discrete
| components.
| teucris wrote:
| 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.
| qwezxcrty wrote:
| 100 um is 4mil, which is the resolution one can get from the
| cheapest PCB offerings. (e.g. for single digit $ from
| JLCPCB).
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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"?
| r2_pilot wrote:
| A mil in manufacturing is 0.001 inches(in this case 100um
| =3.937mil).
| zwog wrote:
| mil in this context is 1/1000 inch
| kragen wrote:
| USAmericans will do anything to avoid using the metric
| system. To them, "mil" means "milli-inch".
| Lerc wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| Lerc wrote:
| 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.
| blackguardx wrote:
| Thin-film transistor circuits can probably approach more of
| what you are envisioning than silicon integrated circuits.
| There are even organic semiconductor versions of TFTs that use
| lower temperatures and liquid chemistry for layer deposition.
| atrus wrote:
| It's really expensive or difficult to have a one off object
| made though, and that's where 3D printing thrived. It fulfills
| that rapid prototyping itch.
|
| People don't even really etch their own pcbs anymore, it's so
| fast and cheap, let alone spend $10k+ to manufacture a six cent
| item (maybe!), so there never was enough motivation for a diy
| movement to make ICs and other nanofabbed stuff
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Especially when the goal is not the 6 cent item but rather
| the thing the six cent item makes possible.
|
| I would whip out the credit card if I could make 555 timers
| at home for fun for $1,000.
|
| Not sure if I put a second mortgage on my house to have a
| chance at maybe making one if I didn't screw up too much.
| ysofunny wrote:
| you're spot on!
|
| clearly a big part of why all these tech has been so
| succesful is also how it's all about investing a lot up
| front, but eventually being able to mass produce in a
| ridiculous scale, few industries have such a ratio (possibly
| pharma?)
|
| so it's all about making chips by the hundreds of thousands.
| it requires a very different approach from any tech intended
| to make chips by the handful
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Nobody ever created a reliable self-contained foolproof PCB
| etching procedure. That's why nobody etches their own PCBs.
|
| If there was a box that received supplies and outputted
| usable PCBs with minimum external mess, a lot of people that
| currently buy boards would use it instead.
|
| (And well, PCB manufacturing is basically the same process as
| chip fabrication, without the miniaturization. If nobody
| managed to create a "PCB printer", why do people keep hopping
| for a "chip printer"?)
| kragen wrote:
| Etching your own PCBs has been a common electronics
| hobbyist activity for 50 years or more. Un-etched one-layer
| and two-layer PCBs were a standard stock item at every
| Radio Shack. Local electronics stores stock ferric chloride
| etchant.
| solomonb wrote:
| Its true, I'm not even that old (late 30s) and used to
| etch tons of PCBs for ham radio projects.
| duped wrote:
| University labs (with the right funding) can totally do this,
| it's just not cheap. My university sold all its fab hardware to
| another university the year before I was able to take a VLSI
| class which at the time, had a practical lab. *
|
| > As I read more about the dark art of IC fabrication
|
| I want to push back on this being a "dark art" - there is no
| magic in engineering (nb4, any sufficiently advanced technology
| etc etc). It's a skillset that requires education, experience,
| and expertise on par with anything we do in other areas of
| engineering. The stakes are just a little higher than software
| because you're dealing with the physical world and physical
| things have tangible costs and/or danger.
|
| The thing that may trip people up is that IC fabrication is one
| of those things that doesn't _really_ have a hobbyist tier.
| Anything beyond a toy requires multiple people and support
| staff in addition to gear and raw materials that are hard to
| get as any old civilian - in addition to the clean room
| facilities. Like the reason my university closed their lab was
| partly because the grad /PhD students and professors had moved
| on, and partly because it was becoming more difficult to source
| wafers for research institutions that they could actually use
| (everyone got hired by labs in industry, where they were making
| their own wafers or buying them wholesale afaict).
|
| * iirc only the penultimate project got taped out and fabbed
| with terrible yields due to time contraints
| jancsika wrote:
| > I want to push back on this being a "dark art" - there is
| no magic in engineering (nb4, any sufficiently advanced
| technology etc etc). It's a skillset that requires education,
| experience, and expertise on par with anything we do in other
| areas of engineering. The stakes are just a little higher
| than software because you're dealing with the physical world
| and physical things have tangible costs and/or danger.
|
| I think "engineering" in software generally means optimizing
| a path to a targeted set of behaviors so that the piles of
| garbage underneath don't end up blocking their execution for
| eternity.
|
| Our starting point is therefore different. You ought to
| somehow be working around all the physical piles of dust and
| patchwork of fires that must be constantly igniting inside
| your laser machinery. I picture it something like the mad
| surgeon in Minority Report, creating a small transient
| sterile environment to do illegal eye surgery in a room full
| of filth.
|
| In that light your "art" looks "dark."
| ackbar03 wrote:
| I don't really know much about ic manufacturing.
|
| Are you sure university labs are really able to to this? If
| so how come only a few companies like tsmc and that one Dutch
| company are able to manufacture microchips? Or are those two
| completely different things and I'm just confusing myself?
| johnny22 wrote:
| that dutch company makes machines involved in creating the
| ICs, not the ICs themselves.
| mercurywells wrote:
| not even that, they really make the machines that make
| the patterns that are used to develop the electronic
| circuits on the ICs
| denotational wrote:
| I'm not sure that's accurate: ASML don't make masks (i.e.
| the patterns), they make the EUV photolithography
| machines that are used in conjunction with the masks.
|
| The physical masks themselves are usually made by Hoya,
| and the technology to actually etch the masks is made by
| Veevo.
| undersuit wrote:
| Semiconductor Fabs have come a long way. The Shockley
| Semiconductor Laboratory opened for business in a small
| commercial lot in Mountain View in 1956.
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Shockley-
| Semiconductor-L...
|
| There was lots of older or used equipment Universities
| could buy before Fabs started being millions of square feet
| with hundreds of million dollar pieces of equipment.
| km3r wrote:
| There is a wide gap between TSMC's cutting edge processes
| and what a university lab would produce. The features on
| the microchip go from a couple nanometers (TMSC cutting
| edge) to tens of micrometers (1000-10000x larger). Large
| size means less transistors, but million instead of
| billions still is plenty for large complex chips, just not
| cutting edge.
| andrewla wrote:
| That's at the very highest end. As the element size gets
| larger there are more fabs capable of doing the work. The
| equipment gets slightly more standardized, etc., although
| ASML (the Dutch company) is still the big dog in the
| equipment space.
|
| But even running a small-scale fab spitting out 7400 series
| chips and 555's is still pretty serious business; you need
| chemical engineers and material scientists as well as
| electrical engineers and software engineers (and
| multidisciplinary versions of those people) to keep things
| running at all. And nobody can do this stuff out of college
| -- everyone has extensive apprenticeships and practical
| experience working in other fabs because so much of the
| process is knowhow rather than technical specifications.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| The trillion-dollar-hard part is doing it profitably at
| scale. Drop that constraint and nearly any feature size is
| "only" million-dollar-hard (maybe 10M or 100M to run a R&D
| shop).
|
| You can poke and prod anything into place with e-beams and
| FIBs and manually dipping wafers in baths and ovens and
| such. 1% yield, hour long write times, and all sorts of R&D
| jank are perfectly fine for checking functionality of your
| fancy ultra-FET design or making a ring oscillator to
| simulate integration. Did a grain of dust land on the wafer
| and ruin 100 of them? No prob, use the other 300, just try
| not to let it happen again. But integrating a billion
| transistors, coordinating them to do a billion calculations
| per second, QAing them to work for a billion seconds with 0
| errors, and manufacturing them to profitably sell at $100 a
| pop? No jank allowed, no small scale antics allowed, and
| your budget now requires all the zeros it can find and more
| besides.
| duped wrote:
| > Are you sure university labs are really able to to this?
|
| Yes, I know of multiple universities that have labs for
| small scale IC production. In fact anywhere doing research
| in the field will have some ability to build these things,
| or access to the industrial labs nearby. Even in industry,
| there are small scale labs that are used to develop the
| processes before they get built out at scale.
|
| > If so how come only a few companies like tsmc and that
| one Dutch company are able to manufacture microchips?
|
| There are thousands of chip manufacturers worldwide. TSMC
| is just the largest/most cutting edge. ASML is the company
| that makes special tools for IC manufacturing (however,
| researchers can/do experiment with the things that ASML is
| doing on smaller scales).
|
| But keep in mind - no researcher at a university is trying
| to manufacture millions of 3nm CPUs for next year's iPhone.
| Just as an example, today we have GaN switches in our 100+W
| USB-C chargers that fit in your pocket. That directly came
| from university and industry research in small scale labs
| into high bandgap semiconductors, which was developed by
| fabbing real circuits and testing them.
| hooverd wrote:
| TSMC (and AMSL) are the bleeding edge of semiconductor
| manufacturing. There's a long tail of other semiconductor
| manufacturers that don't operate at that bleeding edge.
| rasz wrote:
| University students in Poland, under russian occupation no
| less, managed to clone and manufacture Intel 8080 using 6um
| Uni lab in 1982. Writeup in Polish
| http://retrokolekcja.pl/MCY7880.php
|
| In 1983 cult Polish science education TV program SONDA
| documented design and manufacturing of first batches in a
| humorous lets bake a cake fashion. Paper plotters, light
| pens, developing/rinsing dies by hand, electron microscope
| debugging, the whole nine yards!
|
| part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJGp7keIA_o
|
| part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHl6m93Hay0
|
| part 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcOTwkT-PDU
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Yes, my alma mater has a nanofabrication lab on campus:
| https://www.rit.edu/facilities/semiconductor-
| nanofabrication...
|
| They are even able to work with external clients to sell
| the chips they make.
|
| ASML, that one Dutch company, is the only manufacturer of
| EUV photolithography machines, which are required to
| produce the cutting-edge of chips. There are plenty of
| chips that aren't cutting-edge, though, and plenty of
| reason to produce them in both academic and commercial
| settings.
| tjohns wrote:
| Yes indeed. My university had a clean room and research-
| scale fab equipment right next door to some of the lecture
| halls.
|
| https://nanofab.usc.edu/
|
| The key here is research scale. Larger process nodes,
| minimal automation, and smaller yields. Which is just fine,
| because the idea is to prototype new ideas rather than
| produce millions of chips.
| shawndrost wrote:
| It seems you have convinced me that IC fabrication is a dark
| art, despite your intentions.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| When there is a need (remote space colonies for example), they
| might need to develop a more robust process that would trade
| off size and speed of chips for ease of manufacturing.
| ben_w wrote:
| OTOH, remote space colonies get zero-g manufacturing, along
| with free vaccum so hard that makes our best artificial
| vaccum systems seem like a Florida garden during a hurricane
| in comparison.
|
| What they get to do may not help with DIY in a garage on
| Earth.
| Palomides wrote:
| there's no chance of DIY silicon fabs taking off, but the
| industry becoming more accessible to hobbyists is way more
| plausible
|
| imho, the deeper problem is that there are just very few
| situations where you need a custom chip that can't be covered
| by existing options or FPGAs, and vanishingly few people have
| the expertise to get anything interesting done even if they had
| cheap access to fabs
|
| (check out tiny tapeout, though!)
| didip wrote:
| Engineering problems can be solved with engineering solutions,
| e.g. better material science that's not toxic (PLA is common
| now but it was an engineering marvel).
|
| As long as there's a problem and there's money to be made,
| these things you mentioned can be solved.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| I would be happy if electronics companies started offering more
| dense circuits printed on film instead of thick 1mm PCB.
| There's too much volume wasted on tracks, that could be reduced
| layering discrete components and there is film that can isolate
| the heat.
| tdeck wrote:
| You can get flexible printed circuits (FPC) from vendors like
| JLCPCB and PCBWay, which are essentially what you describe.
|
| https://jlcpcb.com/blog/flex-pcb-available-at-jlcpcb-from-
| sp...
|
| https://www.pcbway.com/fpc-rigid-flex-pcb/flex-pcb.html
|
| And in case folks reading this don't already know it, multi-
| layer rigid printed circuit boards are a common technology
| based on laminating together multiple very thin rigid layers
| with each layer carrying separate traces.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > oh so messy and built by trial and error
|
| Not only built by trial and error, but also continuously
| adapted in near real time to deal with new sources of error.
|
| The most complicated aspects of semiconductor manufacturing
| utilize statistical process control to determine the best
| course of action by relying on large sample sizes. You probably
| couldn't start up a modern manufacturing line without already
| having a manufacturing line due to this. Finding viable
| "hyperparameters" for a photo tool makes training an LLM look
| like a tutorial. Bootstrapping all of this required direct
| human involvement with ever-so-careful incremental offloading
| of these concerns to automation over a period of decades.
| cxr wrote:
| > Finding viable "hyperparameters" for a photo tool makes
| training an LLM look like a tutorial.
|
| There's generally an unstated (and occasionally explicit, as
| in this case) reverence from software people for the kind of
| mythical engineering that goes on in fabs. In reality, if
| you've had any direct experience with the manufacturing
| process--and I'm talking about current- or next-gen processes
| for the most sophisticated mass market devices like those
| going into flagship smartphones, mining ASICs, GPUs, and
| critical applications like use in EVs--you know that a bunch
| of it is in the hands of folks whose most desirable asset in
| a prospective worker is that they'll accept low pay to
| eventually get the necessary work done to the prevailing
| standard best described as "adequate".
|
| Valley types especially, but even other software folks would
| be really surprised by how much of what goes on in fabs is
| basically the sort of thing that you would expect to see from
| people plucked from amateur hour. I've posted about this
| before on HN. Where improvement to existing chipmaker
| operations is concerned, the fruit hangs so, so low.
|
| Elon's biggest, dumbest misstep is not just buying Twitter;
| it's buying Twitter and _not_ putting an equal or lesser
| amount of resources instead into gaining control over how his
| own (and others ') chips are made--doing the same thing for
| the industry that he did with SpaceX for aerospace.
|
| Again, because it cannot be emphasized enough: what passes
| for acceptable in fab operations is _bonkers_.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Training an LLM _is_ a rudimentary exercise at this point, so
| maybe not the best example.
| ash-ali wrote:
| If anyone is interested in future small fabs:
| https://atomicsemi.com/ Looks very promising. Founder is an
| interesting person.
| bozhark wrote:
| metrix had a laser etching rapid pcb prototyping laser in 2013
| in seattle. trace routes down to 1mil
| dvdkon wrote:
| There are multiple approaches to easily making basic single-
| sided PCBs at home, but the rest is hard: Multi-layer PCBs,
| vias, through-hole plating, solder mask... Those are all
| things that even hobbyists need, but generally require
| annoying chemicals and multiple manual stages.
|
| All these things have been done by hobbyists before, but I
| suppose doing all of this for a single PCB just isn't
| attractive.
| pragma_x wrote:
| FWIW, there _is_ work being done on the hobby front for IC
| fabrication "at home". We're still far from buying a miniature
| chip-fab-in-a-box product, but current technology makes
| yesterday's tech far more affordable. We're on our way.
|
| Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuVS7MsQk4Y
| hammock wrote:
| How big is a spec of dust? What size can you do if you don't
| worry about dust? 1000nm? Smaller?
| mcdow wrote:
| Assumption: the dream _primary_ value of something like this is
| the ability for individuals to fab chips on their own. Like 3D
| printing, it's for rapid iteration in prototyping. Then once you
| have a design you have one of the big players manufacture it in
| the traditional manner.
|
| If my assumption is true, how is this better than FPGAs?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Then once you have a design you have one of the big players
| manufacture it in the traditional manner._
|
| Why? Assuming this is ignoring a good chunk of individual
| interest. It's similar to people mentioning ordering PCBs
| instead of making your own: sure, making a thousand copies of a
| PCB is now cheap enough on the margin to be accessible. But
| what about making _five_? Or just _one_?
|
| Not every human sees a hobby as an investment into business.
| Not everyone does projects with a sellable product in mind.
| Many just want to test their ideas, have fun, scratch their own
| itch, build something so it exists, and not to sell it.
|
| The primary value of a home fab to me would be to enable
| fabbing a single task-specific chip (or a tiny amount of them)
| for any random need I have, whenever it occurs.
| kragen wrote:
| Every other YouTube video I watch tells me two or three times
| that Their Sponsor JLCPCB (or, equivalently, their competitor
| PCBWay) will fabricate five copies of your PCB for US$10 and
| ship them to you in a week, though the non-promotional price
| seems to be more like US$80. Tiny Tapeout, MOSIS, and CMP do
| similar things for chips, at a much higher cost and longer
| timescale.
| zokier wrote:
| > It's similar to people mentioning ordering PCBs instead of
| making your own: sure, making a thousand copies of a PCB is
| now cheap enough on the margin to be accessible. But what
| about making five? Or just one?
|
| For example JLCPCB is currently offering 5 PCBs (2L,
| 100x100mm) for $2 + $1.52 shipping. That's why people are
| saying that making your own PCBs is not economical.
| eschneider wrote:
| FPGA is clearly more _practical_ if you're trying to bang out
| some commercial functionality. Still, making your own chip fab
| is cool to do in it's own right. :)
| kragen wrote:
| FPGAs mostly aren't useful for analog.
| eschneider wrote:
| That's fair.
| zokier wrote:
| > If my assumption is true, how is this better than FPGAs?
|
| For starters, you can make analog/mixed-signal chips
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Then once you have a design you have one of the big players
| manufacture it in the traditional manner.
|
| That doesn't even work very well with 3D printing. You have no
| chance at all of transferring something from 10um chips into a
| commercial fab.
| kragen wrote:
| Not the actual chip layout, no, but you can very plausibly
| get the circuit design to work. If you're doing this you
| presumably want something you can't do on an FPGA, which
| probably means analog, so you probably don't want the super-
| high-end process nodes like 10nm, 7nm, or 4nm anyway; those
| are generally not going to be very useful for analog signals.
|
| Right now Tiny Tapeout seems to be the best option.
| koeng wrote:
| Analog I guess. I'm trying to make a chip for DNA synthesis,
| and so need physical contact with the real world, with
| electrodes, where electricity from the circuit will cause
| localized pH changes, which you can use for precise control of
| biological reactions. FPGAs can't do that kind of analog work.
| fragmede wrote:
| Sounds fascinating! What sort of ADC and DAC do you need to
| do for that where traditional techniques fall short?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I hope they succeed but making micro/nanoscale structures with
| humanscale machines has always been a hard thing, even for those
| with better funding than the hobbyist.
|
| I recently learned about DNA-directed crystal growth and was
| excited by the idea that it might be a more tractable approach to
| being a big thing and making a small thing (like an integrated
| circuit). I'm not sure how one would go about it in their garage,
| but programming the fine-control-needed steps into the chemical
| rather than into the machine feels like a win.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| One has to admire their efforts, as the upfront costs of a fab
| lab are ridiculously high. As with any technology the Metrology
| becomes the predominant problem domain. i.e. Answering the
| question "Where do we get the repeatable precision?"
|
| There are low-volume lab processes around that can hit below
| <234nm feature sizes, but a clean room must be considered part
| of the machine... And it can take years to figure out how to
| maintain atmospheres and gas mass-flow-control.
|
| Pretty cheeky selling community designed hardware without
| citing the original hobbyists. Nothing they posted looks
| remotely new or novel. Meh =3
| mNovak wrote:
| This looks really fun, and I'm hopeful for low cost prototyping
| to come to IC development. But I think 3D printing is the wrong
| comparison -- the much closer example is PCBs, and while we can
| DIY PCBs (I did this in college) it's not even necessary as
| they're just so cheap because of the rise of aggregators and high
| volume scaling in China.
|
| I have to wonder if there's not more that can be done on this
| front for low cost IC prototyping. I don't think the fixed
| infrastructure is necessarily the problem (i.e. building the fab)
| as there's enough capacity for cheap chips in volume, meaning
| each additional wafer isn't the cost limiting factor. There are
| multi-project wafers (like PCB aggregators), but my understanding
| is that the hard cost limit currently is the NRE of making the
| mask set, which isn't getting amortized over a sufficient number
| of devices in a prototype run.
|
| So cheap masks (or fewer masks) would be an area I'd be
| interested to see development.
| tdeck wrote:
| As an impatient person who likes prototyping I still wish DIY
| PCBs were easier and less messy. The turnaround time of DIY
| can't be beat, but every process I have seen has something I
| don't like about it, except maybe fiber lasers (which I'm not
| too well acquainted with).
| oscillonoscope wrote:
| It's also tooling. Professional grade PCB design software can
| be acquired for a few kilobucks per year and OSS versions
| (KiCAD) are pretty useable. Professional grade IC design
| software is hundreds of thousands per year and open source
| competitors are barely usable in comparison. I do share your
| hopes though, democratizing IC design even a little would be a
| huge boon to hardware development.
| isawczuk wrote:
| Low cost home IC development is something very needed for
| agriculture. If we think about current and future farming
| equipment, it's digital. We need to provide them the ability to
| repair themselves and mod.
| stackghost wrote:
| My father grew up on a farm and I wholeheartedly agree.
| Unfortunately, this is a step in the right direction but the
| goal is still a long ways off. Farmers don't have a spare $50k
| sitting around to build hobbyist IC fabs in the barn.
| therein wrote:
| How about we let them flash the ICs that they have first? Or
| allow them to change the maximum speed on the vehicle without
| having to go to the service center and paying 300 to 500$.
|
| Why are we talking about low cost at home IC development for
| farmers while we don't let them do even that.
| isawczuk wrote:
| Forcing companies to open source their software is not
| possible, but making sure we can replace each component after
| warranty? There are strong right to repair movements, it's
| just matter of time.
| Ladsko wrote:
| But you still have to reverse engineer the IC before you
| can replace it - and once you have that it's still cheaper
| to have it manufactured in an existing Fab than to build
| your own.
| therein wrote:
| In that future you can make yourself a replacement 555 IC
| at home but keep in mind many components have an SIP core.
| kragen wrote:
| Forcing companies to open source their software is
| certainly possible for some senses of the word "possible".
| You could go a long way in that direction just by changing
| the copyright law to not cover software, or to only cover
| software if the source code is deposited with the Library
| of Congress. Or you could change product liability law to
| declare products shipped without complete, compilable
| source code for their firmware to be "defective". Right now
| the political support for such changes isn't there, but
| that can change over time.
|
| More likely we're going to go in the opposite direction,
| though.
| singron wrote:
| Any IC that would be practical to DIY is available for <$1 and
| you could probably get something 1000x more powerful for nearly
| the same price. Making chips isn't the issue here.
| klysm wrote:
| Unfortunately I don't think this has any relevance to that at
| all.
| echoangle wrote:
| You can just get finished Microcontrollers that you can program
| yourself for a fraction of a fraction of the price to make them
| yourself, and orders of magnitude more capable. You will not be
| able to make a chip more capable than an ESP32 for less than
| $2, so how would making an IC yourself help you?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I imagine it would be in preparedness for a time when you
| could no longer get such powerful chips so cheaply and
| quickly, or for one where you no longer trusted the chips you
| could get for some reason.
| hooverd wrote:
| Heh, now they have two yields to worry about. What's stopping
| them from doing this with the various commercial-off-the-shelf
| system-on-a-chips?
| ur-whale wrote:
| Very interesting project, but ...
|
| > We communicate entirely over Discord.
|
| Walled garden, unsearchable content, for what strikes me as an
| open source like DYI endeavor.
|
| Why ?
| satiric wrote:
| Discord is searchable.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Discord is searchable.
|
| From Google ?
| satiric wrote:
| No. But you said "searchable", and it has a search bar, and
| it works pretty well. Actually better, because the filters
| ("from:user", "in:channel-name", "has:image", etc.)
| sometimes work better than google's filters (Discord's are
| simply logic-based, no AI to screw things up).
| ur-whale wrote:
| The point is not the built-in search function of Discord,
| it is to have content such as the work hacker fab is
| doing globally searchable.
|
| By searchable, I mean universally accesible, be it via
| trad. search engines or LLMs.
|
| Instead, any knowledge accrued by that community in that
| particular forum is locked in a box for anyone not
| participating in that forum, which is likely 5 nines of
| humanity if not 6.
|
| It is sad.
| getcrunk wrote:
| Not from the outside
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Just IMO as a semiconductor expert, but to try and scale down the
| existing semiconductor process is not the right approach. It's
| just too complex. There need to be new tools optimized for
| simplicity of reagents, like no toxic photoresist and developers,
| no deadly plasma gases, etc. Or, if those steps are required,
| that they can be decoupled from the local lab. Example: you can
| just buy silicon wafers coated with oxide or metal today
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