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.
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
It seems you have convinced me that IC fabrication is a dark art, despite your intentions.
> 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."
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Yes indeed. My university had a clean room and research-scale fab equipment right next door to some of the lecture halls.
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.
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.
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.
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
that dutch company makes machines involved in creating the ICs, not the ICs themselves.
not even that, they really make the machines that make the patterns that are used to develop the electronic circuits on the ICs
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Training an LLM is a rudimentary exercise at this point, so maybe not the best example.
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
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"?)
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.
Its true, I'm not even that old (late 30s) and used to etch tons of PCBs for ham radio projects.
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.
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
Teaching rocks to think is not for the faint of heart.
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.
How big is a spec of dust? What size can you do if you don’t worry about dust? 1000nm? Smaller?
Dust isn't just a single size, it's a giant range[1], and no, even 1 μm process requires a cleanroom, let alone anything smaller.
[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/particle-sizes-d_934.html
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!)
> 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.
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 in this context is 1/1000 inch
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.
If anyone is interested in future small fabs: https://atomicsemi.com/ Looks very promising. Founder is an interesting person.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
metrix had a laser etching rapid pcb prototyping laser in 2013 in seattle. trace routes down to 1mil
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.
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.
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.
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).
If you're referring to fiber laser pcb production, it's shiete because burnt fr4 becomes conductive, and plethora of other reasons, really.
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?
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.
It's true that most FPGAs have limited built-in analog capabilities. But good DACs and ADCs aren't too expensive, and an FPGA can control them with exceptional precision. Does your process have some kind of input / output that can't be handled that way?
Dedicated DACs/ADCs will almost always offer better performance than the ones you'd find on a microcontroller or even an ASIC.
Sounds fascinating! What sort of ADC and DAC do you need to do for that where traditional techniques fall short?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 10µm chips into a commercial fab.
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.
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. :)
FPGAs mostly aren't useful for analog.
That's fair.
> If my assumption is true, how is this better than FPGAs?
For starters, you can make analog/mixed-signal chips
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
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.
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.
That’s still a massive sum by academic standards. Administrators can afford expenses of that size, but educators will balk.
That's roughly one year of tuition for one student at most US universities.
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.
I mean, all things considered that feels pretty cheap for a mix of new and diy equipment to do this.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 $50k sitting around to build hobbyist IC fabs in the barn.
Unfortunately I don’t think this has any relevance to that at all.
How about we let them flash the ICs that they have first? Or allow them to change the maximum speed on the vehicle without having to go to the service center and paying 300 to 500$.
Why are we talking about low cost at home IC development for farmers while we don't let them do even that.
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.
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.
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.
In that future you can make yourself a replacement 555 IC at home but keep in mind many components have an SIP core.
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?
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.
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
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 ?
Discord is searchable.
Not from the outside
> Discord is searchable.
From Google ?
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).
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.