3 ms·

While it would be cool, such a project is ridiculously far from practical and certainly would not result in anything usable for most purposes. Silicon fabricati

While it would be cool, such a project is ridiculously far from practical and certainly would not result in anything usable for most purposes. Silicon fabrication is intrinsicly a slow, high-investment process which only pays off if you can get enough volume. There's little room for an open-source approach to this kind of industry (where's our open source HVAC?).

wallacoloo 6y ago
You make a lot of assumptions, maybe without even noticing you've made them. Silicon + CMOS happens to be one really high-performing combination. But it's not the only possible platform for computation. The past has seen us through vacuum tubes, magnetic core memory (and its cousin, magnetic logic), TTL (or resistor/transistor logic if you want to reduce the process steps), and through to modern MOSFET-based technologies. Along with each transition are numerous other computational platforms which didn't catch on -- usually because they didn't optimize for the things which the market demanded (e.g. perf, power, yield, and cost at volume). Among all the possible platforms for logic, it's hard for me to imagine that there's not at least one which has properties usable for at least some set of applications by enthusiasts.