Sam Zeloof
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2021–2026
5:46 · 2.5M views · Aug 13, 2021
Sam Zeloof shows the upgraded second iteration of his homemade silicon integrated circuit fabrication process, producing chips with around a thousand transistors in his garage. It is a short overview of what the home fab can now do.
HN uses it as the go-to proof that small-scale, hobbyist chip fabrication is real, and as an entry point to the topic.
10 comments from Hacker News
Mentioned a couple other times in this thread but I don't think anyone has linked Sam Zeloof's video of essentially doing this: this video It's fantastic and I highly recommend watching it.
Somewhat related: a high school student creating his own semiconductor fav in his parent’s garage on a "budget". this video It’s a thoroughly interesting video, but I’m a bit disappointed he never took his idea any further than he did. I’d really love to see something like a 6502 being made at home.
A guy named Sam Zeloof is fabbing functional chips in his garage. I think you might gain a lot from watching his videos about the process. this video
This was mostly about making a silicon wafer. This video shows more detail on the rest of the process in a home lab: this video (blog here: [LINK] )
This is the best paper I've read in a long time -- this has to go in my "Top 10" favorite posts of all time on HN... (To PaulHoule: Another truly excellent post of yours to HN, thank you very much , the HN community and myself appreciate it greatly!) Anyway, let's delve into it -- here's the key quote, IMHO: >"As the previous discussion showed, SUBLEQ is, of course, not the target realization for optical computing. Its purpose is to showcase the simplest form a general-purpose optical computer could take and an intermediary step we take. It can be implemented with less than 100 logic gates and, given enough memory, able to emulate a full x86 with a graphics card running Windows and Doom™ loaded, while crunching AI models as a background task (admittedly all extremely slowly)." Now that is truly awesome! Also, it should be pointed out that if SUBLEQ could be implemented optically, it could also be implemented digitally, say, on the smallest of small gate count FPGA's... While such a FPGA Soft CPU would not be fast -- it would definitely be interesting, and probably very simple (comparatively!) to implement! (Also, it might be implementable on a tiny IC, for example, Sam Zeloof's "Z2" 1,000 gate IC: this video ) Anyway, 5+ Stars for this excellent paper! Upvoted and favorited!