3 ms·
Does anyone have a rough sense what the cost of Sam’s equipment is, and how someone can emulate this on a budget with second hand purchases? Also roughly, woul
by taway21812 5y ago
Does anyone have a rough sense what the cost of Sam’s equipment is, and how someone can emulate this on a budget with second hand purchases?
Also roughly, would anyone know the cost per batch of chips? I’d love to run thing as a learning exercise for middle or high school students and wonder how costly it would be.
- tverbeure 5y agoI don’t know the minimum amount equipment needed to make these chips, but his garage is stuffed with old but still expensive equipment (if you need to buy it on eBay.) Things like a wire bonder, an electron microscope, a vacuum chamber etc. I think that most of these were donated to him though.
- redis_mlc 5y agoI think you're grossly underestimating the difficulty and patience needed to make ICs. Better just to show a film. A more reasonable hands-on school project would be using EasyEDA or KiCad and making a PCB using either a low-end CNC machine or chemical processing. (I had shop class in high school using lathes, etc. and chemistry class with actual reagents, but just from a risk standpoint that's mostly unthinkable today. Both can kill a student.)
- exDM69 5y agoHis lab would cost a fortune if you were buying the equipment new from the manufacturer. But he has been able to source a lot of decommissioned semiconductor fab equipment through eBay and donations etc. Like his wire bonding machine. He has spent years of effort setting it all up, so it's not something for a one off project. But replicating his simpler transistor experiments should be doable on a smaller budget. Also check out Jeri Ellsworth's DIY transistor project. Some nasty chemicals and special equipment is necessary but nothing too much for a hobbyist.