[leggomylibro]

Something like a 3D printer that could produce integrated circuit dies from blank wafers; "VLSI" means "Very Large-Scale Integration". But we're still a long way from that being feasible.

Even if you had a magic box that could turn wafers into dies, you'd still need to be able to source the wafers, ensure an extremely clean environment, screen for imperfections/failures, and package the dies into chips which are robust enough to be handled, soldered, etc.

Some people like Jeri Ellsworth have managed to fabricate individual transistors in the garage, which is extremely impressive, but it's still a long way from there to a packaged integrated circuit.

One step at a time though, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Scale_Integration

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_bonding

[_chris_]

If you're willing to compromise on material, I believe Organic thin-film transistors (OTFT) can be patterned using printers!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_field-effect_transisto...

Paper discussing characterizations and tradeoffs for designing processors for OTFTs:

http://parallel.princeton.edu/papers/micro17-chang.pdf

[esmi]

Cool paper. Thanks for sharing. I’ve worked with OTFT before and this paragraph from the paper pretty much sums up my experience too.

“The operating frequency of the base-line design for OTFTs is approximately 200 Hz while for silicon it is 800 MHz. The optimized design frequency is approximately 40 Hz and 1.36 GHz respectively for organics and silicon. The modest per- formance of OTFTs can be a decent match for applications that need modest computing such as sensors, RFIDs, toys, remote controllers, etc., as described in Section 2. Many of these embedded processor use cases employ embedded processors in the kHz range [31, 35].”

[esmi]

I guess I was wondering what make a fab open source. I.e. say you did have a 3D chip printer, but you didn’t know how it worked and you couldn’t look inside, would that be open source? If that printer counts as open source then I would argue fabs like MOSIS are the equivalent.

You can get all the tech files for their older stuff, with no NDA, from FreePDK. It works fine with VLSI layout tools like magic, which one can git clone the source of.

That said, there isn’t really a lot of mystery in the larger technology sizes like 0.18um. Plenty of universities will tell you exactly how they do it if you look into it.

The big problem with DIY fab ideas is chemical disposal. This will have to be addressed first. Parts of Mountain View are still a superfund site because of older fabs. HF is no joke.

[justinclift]

> say you did have a 3D chip printer, but you didn’t know how it worked and you couldn’t look inside, would that be open source?

How could that possibly be Open Source? :)

If it breaks, or you want to modify it, then it's a no go.

The stuff you'd be able to create from such a thing could be, but the 3D chip printer itself... nope.

[ngcc_hk]

Let us hope. Ultimately not all need to go 7nm. The question is whether a small fab (not home) will work and the minimum order.