> Now we know that it’s possible to make really good transistors with impure chemicals, no cleanroom, and homemade equipment.<p>The good news here is that 2 of those 3 issues are pretty easily solvable. With some work, and a ton of HEPA air purifier machines, you could probably turn an area the size of a small shed or 1 car garage into a class 10000 cleanrom pretty easily. It would be simplest if this area were embedded in a larger area, like a 2 car garage, but, you could probably squeeze it into just a plain old 1 car garage.<p>Chemicals, you can buy online from scientific supply houses. Some, like acetone, you can buy from less specialized sources in high purity. Water and alcohol, you can either buy at high purity pretty easily, or buy lower grade stuff and purify it.<p>Of course, at the point where you're going for higher purity stuff like this, you might want to switch from acetone as a solvent to DMSO. DMSO itself is safe to handle and doesn't evaporate like acetone will.<p>> Silane<p>Yeah, nasty stuff. Toxic as hell, ignites spontaneously when exposed to air. I used to work near a rather large storage tank that contained the stuff. Needless to say, I am glad there never was an accident. :-) Very wise to avoid this stuff.<p>---<p><a href="https://www.americancleanrooms.com/class-10000-clean-room/" rel="nofollow">https://www.americancleanrooms.com/class-10000-clean-room/</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silane" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silane</a>
I want Sam to turn this into a startup somehow. There has got to be something better than the semiconductor industry we have today, which has ridiculous barriers to entry.
This bothers me that these days average engineer can't afford to buy or rent reasonable sized space to do experiments like this. My dream is to build my own IC but I am sure doing that in my living room would likely turn it into something uninhabitable. I've been looking at renting some space in an industrial zone, but that's out of reach money wise even in a remote area.
Does anyone have a rough sense what the cost of Sam’s equipment is, and how someone can emulate this on a budget with second hand purchases?<p>Also roughly, would anyone know the cost per batch of chips? I’d love to run thing as a learning exercise for middle or high school students and wonder how costly it would be.
"Especially my amazing parents, who not only support and encourage me in any way they can but also give me a space to work in and put up with the electricity costs… Thank you!"
He's to the point now where he could make a small ASIC, or CPU, or maybe a high power FET (by paralleling a lot of them)<p>I wish him all the best of luck.
Would love to know the ancillary stuff like waste disposal. Playing with this stuff without making a new superfund site is arguably just as difficult as the core work.
I wonder how far it would be possible to go with an open source / open hardware to have open process for IC development and production.<p>What I mean is given relatively old process but new tooling and software, could we expect to make usable system that is completely transparent from security point of view? And resistant to future attempts at preventing people from having access to trustworthy hardware?
Very cool and impressive.<p>Here is another person who had a fab at home at some point :
<a href="http://www.microfab.co.uk" rel="nofollow">http://www.microfab.co.uk</a><p>They were building not microchips but STJ sensors.
It's a pretty clever process as some of the more critical steps (gate oxide, poly deposition) are done elsewhere. This allows for very stable transistors without a lot of Vth shift. I also like his use of resits for the ILD.<p>Maybe it would be possible to replace some of the more agreessive acids used for poly and Al etch with KOH and lowly concentrated HF.<p>Also, one could also use alloy doping with aluminium to create the junctions and skip the need for a high temperature diffusion. But that would probably not result in a 10µm process and present yield issues...
Related thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28179241" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28179241</a>