Was just going to post this. Ben&#x27;s channel is a treasure trove.

There is a great video on creating lithographic masks on Ben Krasnow&#x27;s Applied Science channel - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;YAPt_DcWAvw?si=RXaS-GY7czqo_TJZ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;YAPt_DcWAvw?si=RXaS-GY7czqo_TJZ</a>The photographic steps are pretty accessible.

They also have a discord server that seems pretty healthily active (I&#x27;m a long time lurker)

The Hacker Fab [1] project at Carnegie Mellon is creating and publishing guides to building simple fab equipment including photolithography and a sputtering system. For somewhat more complex equipment, I appreciate [2] from the founders of InchFab [3].But maybe the easiest way to do (very low resolution) photolithography at home is to use dry film photoresist, which is like tape you can stick onto a copper PCB you then expose and etch; a cheap roll is ~$20 from eBay&#x2F;Amazon.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.hackerfab.org&#x2F;home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.hackerfab.org&#x2F;home</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dspace.mit.edu&#x2F;handle&#x2F;1721.1&#x2F;93835" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dspace.mit.edu&#x2F;handle&#x2F;1721.1&#x2F;93835</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inchfab.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inchfab.com&#x2F;</a>

You could also try to replicate something like the Monster 6502:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monster6502.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monster6502.com&#x2F;</a>It&#x27;s not lithography, but you can build a working processor out of small surface mount chips, and you can solder these chips with lead-free solder. That seems very achievable for a motivated engineer, and probably involves much less toxic chemicals?

Or even gel plate printing, where you get to build multiple layers, one of them being a laser printed photo that is used as a resist.

Silk screen printing is probably the easiest way to introduce the concepts to kids. There are a lot of maker spaces&#x2F;artist collectives and classes that have the basic tools and resources to do it.

It’s fairly easy to make cyanotype yourself: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simplifier.neocities.org&#x2F;cyanotype" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simplifier.neocities.org&#x2F;cyanotype</a>

Thank you, those are some awesome ideas. We&#x27;ve tried about half of them, but the rest are going straight on the list. Much appreciated.

Cyanotype Paper is safe fun for kids to try Sun printing silhouettes.Another project is growing large salt crystals in saturated solution.The Unitech Electric Static Wand Toy off amazon was also popular last year (poorly built mini Van de Graaff generator.)Glow in the dark wall paint and a 5 second strobe light is also a classic silhouette demo.Could also look for linear polarizing sheets, thermochromic sheets, and &quot;Magnetic Viewing film&quot;.Some will like this stuff, others only want to stare at a screen. =3

The timing of this share is crazy, since I was just looking around a few days ago to see if there were any guides or even kits for doing photolithography at home. It&#x27;s part of my mission to demystify modern technology for my kids. I couldn&#x27;t find anything, so this is excellent to see. Far too complex for my kids ages, but it might be cool to replicate at least part of this amazing project when they&#x27;re older.

Replicating late 70s chip fab in one&#x27;s parents&#x27; garage. Incredible honestly, given that the microprocessor is probably the most complex human invention.

Finicky chemicals and relatively expensive equipment. But he’s founded a company with Jim Keller. We occasionally see them post a photo with zero context, but we do know some things. Like they are targeting lots volume stuff and basically building fab equipment. But not much more.

Personally I agree, but the world doesn&#x27;t seem to. Their first project (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sam.zeloof.xyz&#x2F;first-ic&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sam.zeloof.xyz&#x2F;first-ic&#x2F;</a>) was all the way back in 2018, and it doesn&#x27;t seem like it changed all too much (yet), while since I read the first blog post in 2018, I also thought we would have reached a much more mature DIY ecosystem by now.Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I&#x27;m excited too about it, and can&#x27;t wait to personally do some experiments as well, although not at the same scale. But I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s world changing, at least until I&#x27;ve actually seen any changes :)

It&#x27;s really amazing, great work!
And please keep sharing progress and, if you want, how can other people follow on your footsteps!

This isn&#x27;t just awesome, this is world changing. Fabricating our own hardware at home is the hardware equivalent of writing our own free software at home. This will help ensure our long term computing freedom.

&gt; until more traditional business-oriented management has begun to restrict the information provided to the public.Curious to know why you think this cutthroat approach is &#x27;traditional&#x27;. Is there another historical background to it? Every account that I&#x27;ve seen, including the origin story of free software (at MIT) and even the rest of your own explanation, seem to suggest that such institutionalized confiscation and hoarding of knowledge is a recent phenomenon - since about the 70s. Am I missing something?

&gt; It is said that such sharing of information still exists in China in many fieldsWhere can we read more about this?

The semiconductor device industry and Silicon Valley would have never appeared if the early companies working in this field would have been controlled by people obsessed about secrecy and &quot;IP protection&quot;.During the fifties and the sixties, and even until the early seventies, it was common for everyone to publish research papers very unlike those that are published today, where the concrete information is minimal.In the early research papers about semiconductor devices and integrated circuits, it was normal to give complete recipes, including quantities of chemicals, temperatures and times for the processing steps and so on. After reading such papers, you could reproduce the recipes and make the device described and you could measure for yourself to see how true are the claims presented in the paper.That open sharing of information has led to a very quick evolution of the semiconductor technologies during the early years, until more traditional business-oriented management has begun to restrict the information provided to the public.It is said that such sharing of information still exists in China in many fields, and it is the source of their rapid progress.

This is impressive work. Every time I see hobbyist-scale semiconductor projects, it reminds me how much innovation still happens outside big labs. Curious how far this approach can scale.

I was like, this seems like a small machine could automate a lot of it, now that the number of steps are down to around what ECN2 film dev requires…Of course, that’s what they are doing it seems! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atomicsemi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atomicsemi.com&#x2F;</a>

Why?It seems to me that if there were as much of a customer base for custom ICs as there is for PCBs, a fabricator like TSMC could easily offer a batch prototyping service on a 28 nm node, where you buy just a small slice of a wafer, provided you keep to some restrictive design and packaging rules.

It&#x27;s not technologically feasible unless plastic aka flexible ICs take off.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;silicon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;silicon</a>

This is an absolutely vital development for our computing freedom. Billion dollar industrial fabs are single points of failure, they can be regulated, subverted, enshittified by market forces. We need the ability to make our own hardware at home, just like we can make our own freedom respecting software at home.

remember when JLCPCB became popular a few years ago and completely flipped hobby electronics upside down? I don&#x27;t know how possible it is but it would be really cool if that happens in a few years with semiconductors. it&#x27;s kind of mad that they&#x27;ve dominated our lives since the 1970s but you can only make them if you&#x27;re a large company with millions of dollars (or several years, a big garage and lots of equipment as seen here). or tiny tapeout.

This is great!I started programming on an 8 MHz Mac Plus in the late 1980s and got a bachelors degree in computer engineering in the late 1990s. From my perspective, a kind of inverse Moore&#x27;s Law happened, where single-threaded performance stays approximately constant as the number of transistors doubles every 18 months.Wondering why that happened is a bit like asking how high the national debt would have to get before we tax rich people, or how many millions of people have to die in a holocaust before the world&#x27;s economic superpowers stop it. In other words, it just did.But I think that we&#x27;ve reached such an astounding number of transistors per chip (100 billion or more) that we finally have a chance to try alternative approaches that are competitive. Because so few transistors are in use per-instruction that it wouldn&#x27;t take much to beat status quo performance. Note that I&#x27;m talking about multicore desktop computing here, not GPUs (their SIMD performance actually has increased).I had hoped that FPGAs would allow us to do this, but their evolution seems to have been halted by the powers that be. I also have some ideas for MIMD on SIMD, which is the only other way that I can see this happening. I think if the author can reach the CMOS compatibility they spoke of, and home lithography could be provided by an open source device the way that 3D printing happened, and if we could get above 1 million transistors running over 100 MHz, then we could play around with cores having the performance of a MIPS, PowerPC or Pentium.In the meantime, it might be fun to prototype with AI and build a transputer at home with local memories. Looks like a $1 Raspberry Pi RP2040 (266 MIPS, 2 core, 32 bit, 264 kB on-chip RAM) could be a contender. It has about 5 times the MIPS of an early 32 bit PowerPC or Pentium processor.For comparison, the early Intel i7-920 had 12,000 MIPS (at 64 bits), so the RP2040 is about 50 times slower (not too shabby for a $1 chip). But where the i7 had 731 million transistors, the RP2040 has only 134,000 (not a typo). So 50 times the performance for over 5000 times the number of transistors means that the i7 is only about 1% as performant as it should be per transistor.I&#x27;m picturing an array of at least 256 of these low-cost cores and designing an infinite-thread programming language that auto-parallelizes code without having to manually use intrinsics. Then we could really start exploring stuff like genetic algorithms, large agent simulations and even artificial life without having to manually transpile our code to whatever non-symmetric multiprocessing runtime we&#x27;re forced to use currently.

What are the factors you expect to limit the integration scale in a garage fab?

You could make in a garage some decent analog integrated circuits, e.g. audio amplifiers or operational amplifiers or even radio-frequency circuits for not too high frequency ranges.However you cannot make useful digital circuits. For digital circuits, the best that you can do is to be content to only design them and buy an FPGA for implementing them, instead of attempting to manufacture a custom IC.With the kind of digital circuits that you could make in a garage, the most complex thing that you could do would be something like a very big table or wall digital clock, made not with a single IC like today, but with a few dozen ICs.Anything more complex than that would need far too many ICs.

Awesome! I wouldn&#x27;t have thought that it is possible to make ICs in a garage. Of course it requires a lot of knowledge, etc. But still, not a multi-billion dollar clean room with specialist equipment.

He founded a company with Jim Keller called Atomic Semi since then.

oh man, I remember hearing about this back then and I got excited that there had been an update. From what I hear he’s gone off to college now but will hopefully be back to cooking up semiconductors once he graduates

should have added this happened in 2021

A semi in British slang is a partially erect penis. I guess “atomic semi” would sound like “partially erect micro-penis” to a Brit.

Not American, not a Brit here. Care to explain?

Does that name make childish Americans giggle in the same way as this childish Brit?

One of the cofounders it seems <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atomicsemi.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atomicsemi.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a>

Had no idea he&#x27;d started a company, always found his blog posts so inspirational. Really hope he succeeds!

cant wait to see what his latest venture will bring about<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atomicsemi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atomicsemi.com&#x2F;</a>allegedly jim keller is one of the investors!

&gt; Regulations can be bad but they can also stop environmental disasters from happening.It makes me wonder how bad the situation is, when you feel the need to start your sentence with &#x27;regulations can be bad&#x27;, while corporations fight you for their right to release PFAS into your drinking water sources.

It’s also worth seeing how many US superfund sites are on former chip fabs. Intel, AMD, Fairchild etc. all just dumped things down the drains.Regulations can be bad but they can also stop environmental disasters from happening.

Of note, Sam’s co-founder in Atomic Semi is none other than Jim Keller (!)

I wonder if the pipeline is fully operational? US Grants -&gt; investor -&gt; scam company-&gt; ?????

As much as I hate to say it Substrate is probably a fraud<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Semiconductors&#x2F;s&#x2F;jpuI772PJB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;Semiconductors&#x2F;s&#x2F;jpuI772PJB</a>If Europe has an overregulation problem, the US may also have a grifter problem

Is the &quot;regulation bad&quot; &#x2F; &quot;Europe bad&quot; angle actually relevant here, or did you just take the opportunity to use this thread as your soapbox?

Although this is in 2021, it&#x27;s great to see that Sam Zeloof also made Atomic Semi [0].A display of &quot;just doing things&quot;, no permission needed and no need for barriers and red tape.It is another reason why I have huge promise for Substrate [1] founded by James Proud (UK native moved to US) another display of &quot;just doing things&quot;.However in Europe and the UK, it&#x27;s &quot;this law allows you to do this, this and this&quot;, &quot;we&#x27;ve changed the law, here is a massive immediate fine&quot;, &quot;ban encryption&quot; (this nearly happened), &quot;ban maths&quot;, &quot;we are the first to regulate and ban this&quot;.It is no wonder the US will continue to be great at building things.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atomicsemi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;atomicsemi.com&#x2F;</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;substrate.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;substrate.com&#x2F;</a>

The US concentration camp industry is booming though.

I don&#x27;t know about this particular case, but ICE are grabbing people right out of naturalization hearings these days. Anything to try and hit that deportation quota.

I’m curious on the details. Isn’t marrying a citizen an instant path to residency and presumably rather quick way to get authorized for work? Are they holding him for having previously been in the states on an expired visa?

&gt; Enforcing the law is not anti-immigramt insanity.Interesting you mention that, a few threads ago you were adamant that the EU wanting to enforce their speech laws on Twitter was 100% anti-free-speech insanity though.It would seem that for you the insanity of the sheer fact of enforcement (since you clearly weren&#x27;t talking about the character of enforcement) depends on your underlying sentiment on the given topic. Is that really intentional on your part? Sounds a bit perilous to me reasoning wise, if so.Or did you simply change your mind since our last discussion?

The enforcement isn’t the insanity, the law is.

Enforcing the law is not anti-immigramt insanity.

Love this stuff.Followed a couple of links and ended up on his brother&#x27;s page, reading about another example of the anti-immigrant insanity that&#x27;s taken hold of this country: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adam.zeloof.xyz&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;01&#x2F;karim&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adam.zeloof.xyz&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;01&#x2F;karim&#x2F;</a> . So sad.

Z2 – Lithographically fabricated IC in a garage fab

Turtletoy

Emacs is my new window manager

Damn Small Linux

I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

Bag of words, have mercy on us

Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices

Mechanical power generation using Earth's ambient radiation

PDF: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stroustrup.com&#x2F;JSF-AV-rules.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stroustrup.com&#x2F;JSF-AV-rules.pdf</a>

The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video]

Google Titans architecture, helping AI have long-term memory

Work disincentives hit the near-poor hardest (2022)

Uninitialized garbage on ia64 can be deadly (2004)

An Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform

Solving Rush Hour, the Puzzle (2018)

The Anatomy of a macOS App

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;jEJAj" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;jEJAj</a>