[HN Gopher] A 32-bit processor made with an atomically thin semi...
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A 32-bit processor made with an atomically thin semiconductor
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 114 points
Date : 2025-04-08 13:08 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| amelius wrote:
| I'm still waiting for that inkjet printer that can print
| transistors.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-01391-2
| godelski wrote:
| Has anyone tried to replicate this? Seems like it would be very
| useful for amateur makers/hackers were it not for the $23k
| printer cost (no idea for the cost of the discussed silver
| ink). But surely someone crazy had access to one and tried or
| has tried to replicate on a cheaper printer? I figure HN has a
| decent chance of helping find said persons?
| superb_dev wrote:
| I don't think they've tried it yet, but it's seems up the
| alley of Applied Science on YouTube
| godelski wrote:
| I'm not sure this is Ben's forte, but you're right that I
| wouldn't be surprised if he tries it, though he has done
| some circuit stuff[0,1] so nothing would surprise me from
| him. (Hi Ben! Love the work!) BUT I do think this is
| something Sam Zeloof[2] try. He's done some lithography
| using a projector[3]. Also there's Jeri Ellsworth, but I
| think she's shifted to mostly working with her AR project.
| Tons of old videos on that stuff if you're into it.
|
| Side note: I'm assuming anyone who knows any of these
| people would be interested that a new Dan Gelbart video
| just dropped[5]!
| -----------------------------------------
|
| Other side note: @YouTube people (and @GoogleSearch), can
| we talk about search? The updates have been progressively
| making it harder to find these types of accounts. People
| who do * _highly*_ technical things. I get that these are
| aimed at extremely specific audiences but this type of
| information is some of the most valuable information on the
| planet. Lots of knowledge is locked into people 's heads
| and these classes of videos are one of the biggest booms to
| knowledge distribution we've ever seen in the course of
| humanity. I understand that this does not directly lead to
| profits to YouTube (certainly it _DOES_ for Google Search),
| but indirectly it does (keeps these users on your
| platform!) and has a high benefit to humanity in general.
| The beauty of YouTube and Google was you could access
| anything. That we recognized everyone was different and we
| could find like minded people in a vast sea. The problem
| search was meant to solve was to get us access to hard to
| find things. To find needles in ever growing haystacks!
| Please, I really do not want to return to the days of pre-
| search. Nor even early search! It should be _easier_ to
| find niche topics these days, not harder. LLMs aren 't
| going to fix this. This is becoming an existential crisis
| and it needs to be resolved.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIqhpxul_og
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYgIuc-VqHE
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/@SamZeloof
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVoldtNpIzI
|
| [4] https://www.youtube.com/@JeriEllsworthJabber
|
| [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuZjjActWmQ
| PaulHoule wrote:
| LLMs could help if they were specifically applied to the
| task [1], however people are actually applying them to
| the generation of countless slop videos. Google's
| problem, which I think there is no cure for, is that
| Google believes it is #1 and to quote Fatboy Slim "We're
| #1 why try harder?" If in some way they feel they have
| competition it is to be a 2nd rate TikTok, not be a
| better version of what made YouTube great.
|
| In the meantime, for everybody that's been turned on to
| something really awesome and creative on YouTube somebody
| else got turned on to something really toxic.
|
| [1] Something significant happens every 10 years in
| search relevance, and SBERT was one of those.
| ezst wrote:
| Again someone mistaking LLMs with knowledge bases. Must
| be a day finishing in `y`
| philipkglass wrote:
| It's possible that the inkjet printed transistor is both
| replicable _and_ impractical for building a full
| microprocessor.
|
| The inkjet transistor article says "A total of 216 devices
| were tested with a yield of greater than 95%, thus
| demonstrating the true scalability of the process for
| achieving integrated systems." But 95% yield on the
| transistor level implies vanishingly low yield at the device
| level when you need thousands of transistors to build a full
| microprocessor.
|
| Even the new MoS2 microprocessor discussed in the Ars article
| wasn't fabricated all at once. It was built up from sub-
| components like shift registers containing fewer transistors,
| then those components were combined to make a full
| microprocessor. See for example "Supplementary Fig. 7 | Yield
| analysis of wafer-level 8-bit registers." in the
| supplementary information:
|
| https://static-
| content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
|
| _The yield of 8-bit registers, each consisting of 144
| transistors, can reach 71% on the wafer._
| godelski wrote:
| My knowledge of transistors is pretty limited[0]. Does the
| yield percentage refer to number of successful chips on a
| substrate or look more at the total number of successful
| transistors? (Or confusing hybrid-term like rain forecasts)
| I believe your comment implies the latter? So the number of
| successful processors is quite low? How many failed
| transistors can you have in a working microprocessor?
| (Probably not an easy to answer question?)
|
| [0] Am I remembering correctly that this is your area?
| exe34 wrote:
| if you could print transistors, you could make computers
| the way Wozniak made them - a bunch of chips with a ton of
| wiring.
| chongli wrote:
| You can do that easily and cheaply today without a fancy
| transistor printer.
|
| You can find Apple II schematics easily enough online.
| All the chips are common, off-the-shelf parts still
| available today. You can send the KiCAD drawings (also
| available) to a company like PCBWay and have PCBs made
| very cheaply and in small quantity. Then all you have to
| do is solder in the chips and other components and
| connect the board to a power supply.
| exe34 wrote:
| I think the appeal is the you can print out a couple of
| pages of chips and wire them up, not send out for chips
| and PCBs.
| chongli wrote:
| You can order a whole batch of chips and wire them up on
| breadboards without sending away to have a PCB made. The
| PCB step is the last one when you want to finalize your
| computer and package it up.
|
| Ben Eater actually has a free course on YouTube [1] all
| about building a breadboard computer!
|
| [1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE40
| 5J2565d...
| bombela wrote:
| I am building one. Right after I find out where to buy liquid
| semi-conductor paste.
| ohazi wrote:
| I suspected that this was the case when they mentioned adding
| "one bit at a time" -- the CPU design that they implemented is
| Olof Kindgren's SERV [0], a tiny bit-serial risc-v CPU/soc
| (award-winning, of course).
|
| From [1]:
|
| > Olof Kindgren
|
| > 5th April 2025 at 10:59 am
|
| > It's a great achievement, but I'm of course a little sad to see
| that it's not mentioned anywhere that Wuji is just a renaming of
| my CPU, SERV. They even pasted in block diagrams from my
| documentation.
|
| [0] https://github.com/olofk/serv
|
| [1] https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/2d-32-bit-
| ri...
| koverstreet wrote:
| That sort of copying without attribution should be considered
| outright misconduct; it certainly would be in academia.
| lambda wrote:
| Huh? This is a paper published in Nature, and it does cite
| Olof Kindgren and SERV in the references:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08759-9#Bib1
|
| The paper itself is behind a paywall so I can't see it, but
| it looks from the references like they provided proper
| attribution.
|
| It's unfortunate that some of the articles around it don't
| mention that, but it seems like the main point of this is
| discussing the process for building the transistors, and then
| showing that can be used to build a complete CPU, not the CPU
| design itself which they just used an off-the-shelf open
| source one, which is designed to use a very small number of
| gates.
| reaperman wrote:
| > The paper itself is behind a paywall so I can't see it
|
| https://archive.org/details/s41586-025-08759-9
| chmod775 wrote:
| They do mention SERV in their references (38).
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08759-9
|
| Sadly I can't access the full article right now.
| inverted_flag wrote:
| That's China for you.
| metalman wrote:
| I like where they say "a sheet that is only a bit over a single
| atom thick, due to the angles between its chemical bonds" it's
| funny that material science has achived ultimate precision, but
| it can only be talked about in general terms Is there any exact
| way to describe the thickness of molebdium disulfide sheets?,
| beyond "a bit over one atom thick" clearly they are etching parts
| of the sheet, and somehow attaching leads, but is it done
| strictly in two dimensions, ie: litteral, flat land?
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