[INTPenis]

Jokes aside, seeing as this person has created their own clean room in a shed, and is making RAM, what exactly is stopping any company from doing this themselves and breaking into the RAM business?

I'd pay less for RAM that wasn't "certified" in some official way, at least it works.

[Dylan16807]

It's really easy to set up a manufacturing process for basically anything if you can spend 100x per unit compared to the big optimized factories and you don't mind the product being a lot slower.

The clean room isn't the hard part about being competitive. It's using advanced lithography to cram billions of cells into a single chip. If you want make DDR2 chips on a 90 nanometer process, that is accessible to a whole lot of companies, but nobody will buy the product. And in the micrometer range you can DIY like this guy.

[INTPenis]

Nobody will buy the product?

I'm an infrastructure architect and work with health care, local tax agency, they're all getting 25-30% inflated bills now for new hardware.

And what happens when smaller companies have to repair or scale their infrastructure and can't get affordable RAM?

I'd say if people aren't desperate already, they're about to be.

[Dylan16807]

> Nobody will buy the product?

Correct, nobody will buy your 1GB stick of DDR2-speed RAM for the $100 it cost you to produce it.

> And what happens when smaller companies have to repair or scale their infrastructure and can't get affordable RAM?

That situation sucks but bringing up more obsolete fabrication isn't going to help. They can't compete with modern chips even when those modern chips have a 5x price penalty.

[INTPenis]

Ok sorry I misread you saying that it was easy with nm manufacturing but nobody will buy the product, you said it's easy to manufacture micrometer DDR2 speeds.

[Dylan16807]

Single digit micrometer is really easy and makes toys and/or microcontrollers. 90nm is sort of easy if you have factory money, and is about what you need for DDR2. It gets a lot more difficult as you go beyond that.

[nebula8804]

In one of Dwarkesh's interviews, he mentioned that China is trying to replicate the entire stack. Ironically now that they have mastered all pieces of the stack for older nodes, they actually have an advantage in a collapse scenario. The US does not appear to have the ability to do all steps in the stack for any node. They still rely on other western countries that could go offline. China despite being behind does at least have top to bottom capability for older nodes. Combine that with their rock bottom electricity prices and they have a unique card that they can play.

Just imagine if electricity costs were trending towards 0. Instead of e-waste run all those machines till the chips burn out.

[fancyfredbot]

Lucky for America, in the case of civilizational collapse there will be a lot of spare semiconductors thanks to almost everyone being dead!

[nebula8804]

Well we have cool projects like CollapseOS the problem is that there is so much undocumented silicon out there that cant be used without massive efforts. I know several "gold scrappers" and its such a shame that they trash great classic chips just go get back a bit of metal. So much effort went into making those chips and its just a shame that many can't be reused. While lack of cheap electricity prevents open design from being reused, there is an even bigger world of undocumented chips that are trashed as well.

[pjc50]

I'm not really sure what you mean by "certified"; I don't think JEDEC are handing out stickers. Although I am reminded of the Bunnie Huang article about SD cards, where the Shenzen vendor would give you the same SD card with the manufacturer logo + holographic authenticity .. of your choice.

The real problem with the RAM business is that it was commodified; normally manufacturers make a relatively small margin. No incentive to build a factory for that. These are not normal times because (a) someone has bought all the RAM and (b) someone has blown up a whole load of globally critical infrastructure in the Middle East.

The risk the existing RAM manufacturers are being cautious about is the risk of normal: if you start building a factory now, will you be selling into a RAM glut?

[fancyfredbot]

He's producing semiconductors with a 1000nm (one micron) feature size. This kind of tech was cutting edge in the mid 80s. You might be able to produce a 32KB memory chip with it.

It would be difficult to break into the RAM business with that sort of product as most of the demand these days is for higher capacities.

[imglorp]

EUV lithography is the state of the art. It makes far denser chips and is quite out of reach for the backyard fellow. Find a documentary on how ASML machines work: they're near the pinnacle of human accomplishment!

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

[chii]

> what exactly is stopping any company from doing this themselves and breaking into the RAM business?

nothing, except the terrible yields that they would obtain, and the lack of scale making the entire enterprise not profit generating (as the amount of profit per sale is too low if it even is positive, but you can't set it higher as there's cheaper, "better" ram available from pre-established fabs that do have economies of scale).

You could play the artisanal angle, and market it as home grown, organic ram. Not sure how much real buyers of ram care, but might get a few hobbyists in the market.

[INTPenis]

The angle right now I think is pretty obvious, there is a massive shortage that might cause actual incidents.

OpenAI should do their own production, I say slightly bitter because I'm in a health care sector that might be affected because we can't scale up or repair our infrastructure due to their massive pre-orders.

[pvo50555]

Local, small-batch RAM! Top fermenting Get it at your local farmer's market!

[zozbot234]

You can make eDRAM using logic processes (which are currently less bottlenecked than RAM, at least for non cutting-edge nodes) but the cost is still prohibitive compared to specialty DRAM processes (even when considering the recent increase in DRAM prices). If you were doing that, you'd want to use it for compute-in-memory instead, which basically pushes NUMA to an extreme of having lots of tiny cores each with direct access to its own local DRAM.

[moffkalast]

So, CXMT?

[muyuu]

i assume the reason is that this is a very competitive market and you need hundreds of billions in investment to just start producing at a competitive quality and price, with massive uncertainty that you will be able to make that money back

i mean, you'd think if someone is willing to through 60B (or 10B for an option to buy at a 60B valuation) at Cursor, then other people would give it a shot at starting a SotA semiconductor fab, but apparently the profit expectations are not there