I'm thinking about trying to take this on myself, after watching and reading everything from Sam and Huygens Optics, and going through Chris Mack's course onlin

I'm thinking about trying to take this on myself, after watching and reading everything from Sam and Huygens Optics, and going through Chris Mack's course online. I think the problems for offering any kind of hardware solution for this is that everything involved is either "pretty easy" or "pretty darn hard". A decent UV laser, a workable optics bench, and 3/4 of the process chemicals are cheap and readily available. You can even build a "clean enough" fume hood. The processes are decently documented already in an open way. Super high precision 3x axis closed loop micrometer or piezo stages, a wire bonder, and good quality pre-layered wafers are so far beyond small distributor or hobbyist scale that they're relegated to elusive Ebay scores. The other 1/4 of the process chemicals require getting a big distributor like Sigma to work with you, and some of them really require chemistry training to work with safely, although it's great to see some of the workarounds. I believe Jeroen at Huygens Optics is a chemist by training. He's comfortable working with things like HF that you really don't want to promote to amateurs, but are essential to get past a few thousand transistors. Getting a complete process beyond the 70s era stuff at an amateur level is probably impossible right now. The absolutely insane requirements for silicon growing/cleaning alone are just more than one person can fit in their head, or their garage. I'd compare it to large liquid fueled rocket engines, which are another common nerd dream project. Plenty of people understand the principles, and a few college teams or the equivalent have built working ones, but there's probably just too much to know and understand to do it solo and with no serious budget.