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Hacker Fab
- Tepix 2y agoLooks like it costs slightly above $50,000 just in hardware devices to setup such a Hacker Lab. Here's hoping costs will come down some more soon.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- atrus 2y agoI mean, all things considered that feels pretty cheap for a mix of new and diy equipment to do this.
- 9979800133 2y ago[flagged]
- nxobject 2y agoWith luck, as a pedagogical tool it'll be accessible to academic institutions all over the world with $50k, at least. I hope this effort succeeds, but I don't know about the catches involved here.
- zusammen 2y agoThat’s still a massive sum by academic standards. Administrators can afford expenses of that size, but educators will balk.
- kragen 2y agoThat's roughly one year of tuition for one student at most US universities.
- Loughla 2y agoJust a note, the average tuition for universities in the US is somewhere around 26k usually. And when you look at just public universities, it's something like 14k on average. But the point still stands, I think. We're talking about 2 or 3 students to be able to fund this.
- kragen 2y agoI appreciate the correction.
- Loughla 2y ago50k is not a lot for even a mid sized college or university. The very small college I work for (enrollment under 1200) just spent 250k on two robotics classrooms. A school with any engineering program at all will spend this amount of money on something like this with very little hesitation. And even if they won't spend hard dollars, every institution employees people to write grants (that's what I do). The amount of public and private grants in the STEM field for higher education is mind boggling. I can think of 4 businesses that would write this check next week after the application is submitted. Hell, I can think of one business that would probably write the check tomorrow after a quick phone call.
- nxobject 2y agoThe bizarre economics of American higher ed aside, I'm thinking outside the US – and countries in the global north – as well. A flagship institution in a middle or even low-income country might be able to afford a system like that, too, even if it involves going to the EU for development funds.
- cweagans 2y agoHow much is custom silicon from an established fab for the average person? I suspect that even a small run would be more than $50k, but I don’t have any point of reference.
- andrewla 2y agoWhen we saw a rise in 3d printing, I was very hopeful that a hobbyist movement towards fabricating large-feature ICs would soon arise. Nobody's doing 4nm fabrication in their garage, I reasoned, but surely we could get to ~10um. As I read more about the dark art of IC fabrication, though, I realized that even this was a faint dream. I had imagined a world of lasers carving troughs, and print heads carefully placing down the lines and doping the silicon, an elegant symphony of modern technology. But the real world is much messier -- every stage involves dangerous and toxic chemicals, processes that are spoiled by a spec of dust in the wrong place, either causing a cascade of reagent failures or a physical impediment to correctness; distressingly analog and oh so messy and built by trial and error and refined by domain experts in ways that are intensely hard to replicate because all the same lessons need to be learned again each time. I'm glad to see the work being done here for hobbyist fabrication, but barring huge leaps and bounds, the gap between the neat lines in Magic and the shiny silicon discs is a vast chasm owned by the material scientists, not the electrical engineers or the software engineers.
- foobarian 2y ago> but surely we could get to ~10um. Well, why not 100um then? It's still way better than discrete components.
- teucris 2y agoI’m convinced this is the way to go. Rather than imitating commercial fab techniques, let’s find something that works without the toxic chemistry or vacuum chambers, even if it’s janky at first. 3D printers were janky at first too.
- qwezxcrty 2y ago100 um is 4mil, which is the resolution one can get from the cheapest PCB offerings. (e.g. for single digit $ from JLCPCB).
- ben_w 2y ago> 100 um is 4mil Just checking, "4mil"? When I see (or hear) "mil" I assume millimeters, which clearly isn't right here, but I don't know if this is autocorrupt or if this is shorthand for something else I've never seen called this before, say "1e-4 meters"?
- mcdow 2y agoAssumption: the dream primary value of something like this is the ability for individuals to fab chips on their own. Like 3D printing, it’s for rapid iteration in prototyping. Then once you have a design you have one of the big players manufacture it in the traditional manner. If my assumption is true, how is this better than FPGAs?
- TeMPOraL 2y ago> Then once you have a design you have one of the big players manufacture it in the traditional manner. Why? Assuming this is ignoring a good chunk of individual interest. It's similar to people mentioning ordering PCBs instead of making your own: sure, making a thousand copies of a PCB is now cheap enough on the margin to be accessible. But what about making five? Or just one? Not every human sees a hobby as an investment into business. Not everyone does projects with a sellable product in mind. Many just want to test their ideas, have fun, scratch their own itch, build something so it exists, and not to sell it. The primary value of a home fab to me would be to enable fabbing a single task-specific chip (or a tiny amount of them) for any random need I have, whenever it occurs.
- kragen 2y agoEvery other YouTube video I watch tells me two or three times that Their Sponsor JLCPCB (or, equivalently, their competitor PCBWay) will fabricate five copies of your PCB for US$10 and ship them to you in a week, though the non-promotional price seems to be more like US$80. Tiny Tapeout, MOSIS, and CMP do similar things for chips, at a much higher cost and longer timescale.
- zokier 2y ago> It's similar to people mentioning ordering PCBs instead of making your own: sure, making a thousand copies of a PCB is now cheap enough on the margin to be accessible. But what about making five? Or just one? For example JLCPCB is currently offering 5 PCBs (2L, 100x100mm) for $2 + $1.52 shipping. That's why people are saying that making your own PCBs is not economical.
- eschneider 2y ago
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI hope they succeed but making micro/nanoscale structures with humanscale machines has always been a hard thing, even for those with better funding than the hobbyist. I recently learned about DNA-directed crystal growth and was excited by the idea that it might be a more tractable approach to being a big thing and making a small thing (like an integrated circuit). I'm not sure how one would go about it in their garage, but programming the fine-control-needed steps into the chemical rather than into the machine feels like a win.
- Joel_Mckay 2y agoOne has to admire their efforts, as the upfront costs of a fab lab are ridiculously high. As with any technology the Metrology becomes the predominant problem domain. i.e. Answering the question "Where do we get the repeatable precision?" There are low-volume lab processes around that can hit below <234nm feature sizes, but a clean room must be considered part of the machine... And it can take years to figure out how to maintain atmospheres and gas mass-flow-control. Pretty cheeky selling community designed hardware without citing the original hobbyists. Nothing they posted looks remotely new or novel. Meh =3
- nzrrsm 2y agoI've been thinking about this a bunch lately and very much agree. We really need a way to build these nanodevices that doesn't involve lithography. Using something like DNA to carry information to the surface seems way easier and more effective/robust as we continue to scale down and out.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI wouldn't go so far as "way easier". It's just difficult for a single reason that's easy to imagine a solution to rather than 100 different reasons which are not. I'm not in the field, but I'm under the impression that our ability to encode our wishes into DNA is closer to: > make me a 1um tall pyramid out of nanoparticles which are all the same type ...than it is to: > make me a NAND gate out of this solution of nanoparticles, some are doped in different ways than others. Most miracles involving DNA are heavily inspired by nature, and there's not a lot of natural code available for the construction of logic gates. I'm not sure which of these is harder: 1. make biochemical systems which construct arbitrary solid state circuits 2. abandon solid state and do our computing in living tissue What I like about the former is that there are a lot of other things that investment in that area might produce, things which aren't a hassle to keep alive, even if a general purpose circuit constructor happens to be out of reach.
- mNovak 2y agoThis looks really fun, and I'm hopeful for low cost prototyping to come to IC development. But I think 3D printing is the wrong comparison -- the much closer example is PCBs, and while we can DIY PCBs (I did this in college) it's not even necessary as they're just so cheap because of the rise of aggregators and high volume scaling in China. I have to wonder if there's not more that can be done on this front for low cost IC prototyping. I don't think the fixed infrastructure is necessarily the problem (i.e. building the fab) as there's enough capacity for cheap chips in volume, meaning each additional wafer isn't the cost limiting factor. There are multi-project wafers (like PCB aggregators), but my understanding is that the hard cost limit currently is the NRE of making the mask set, which isn't getting amortized over a sufficient number of devices in a prototype run. So cheap masks (or fewer masks) would be an area I'd be interested to see development.
- tdeck 2y agoAs an impatient person who likes prototyping I still wish DIY PCBs were easier and less messy. The turnaround time of DIY can't be beat, but every process I have seen has something I don't like about it, except maybe fiber lasers (which I'm not too well acquainted with).
- rnewme 2y agoIf you're referring to fiber laser pcb production, it's shiete because burnt fr4 becomes conductive, and plethora of other reasons, really.
- oscillonoscope 2y agoIt's also tooling. Professional grade PCB design software can be acquired for a few kilobucks per year and OSS versions (KiCAD) are pretty useable. Professional grade IC design software is hundreds of thousands per year and open source competitors are barely usable in comparison. I do share your hopes though, democratizing IC design even a little would be a huge boon to hardware development.
- 15155 2y ago
- isawczuk 2y agoLow cost home IC development is something very needed for agriculture. If we think about current and future farming equipment, it's digital. We need to provide them the ability to repair themselves and mod.
- stackghost 2y agoMy father grew up on a farm and I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, this is a step in the right direction but the goal is still a long ways off. Farmers don't have a spare $50k sitting around to build hobbyist IC fabs in the barn.
- therein 2y agoHow about we let them flash the ICs that they have first? Or allow them to change the maximum speed on the vehicle without having to go to the service center and paying 300 to 500$. Why are we talking about low cost at home IC development for farmers while we don't let them do even that.
- isawczuk 2y agoForcing companies to open source their software is not possible, but making sure we can replace each component after warranty? There are strong right to repair movements, it's just matter of time.
- Ladsko 2y agoBut you still have to reverse engineer the IC before you can replace it - and once you have that it's still cheaper to have it manufactured in an existing Fab than to build your own.
- therein 2y agoIn that future you can make yourself a replacement 555 IC at home but keep in mind many components have an SIP core.
- kragen 2y ago
- ur-whale 2y agoVery interesting project, but ... > We communicate entirely over Discord. Walled garden, unsearchable content, for what strikes me as an open source like DYI endeavor. Why ?
- satiric 2y agoDiscord is searchable.
- ur-whale 2y ago> Discord is searchable. From Google ?
- satiric 2y agoNo. But you said "searchable", and it has a search bar, and it works pretty well. Actually better, because the filters ("from:user", "in:channel-name", "has:image", etc.) sometimes work better than google's filters (Discord's are simply logic-based, no AI to screw things up).
- ur-whale 2y agoThe point is not the built-in search function of Discord, it is to have content such as the work hacker fab is doing globally searchable. By searchable, I mean universally accesible, be it via trad. search engines or LLMs. Instead, any knowledge accrued by that community in that particular forum is locked in a box for anyone not participating in that forum, which is likely 5 nines of humanity if not 6. It is sad.
- getcrunk 2y agoNot from the outside
- georgeburdell 2y agoJust IMO as a semiconductor expert, but to try and scale down the existing semiconductor process is not the right approach. It’s just too complex. There need to be new tools optimized for simplicity of reagents, like no toxic photoresist and developers, no deadly plasma gases, etc. Or, if those steps are required, that they can be decoupled from the local lab. Example: you can just buy silicon wafers coated with oxide or metal today
- warambo1010 2y ago[dead]
- nwiswell 2y agoWhile I'm sympathetic to democratizing access to simple fabrication technology, I have serious misgivings about hobbyists getting involved. There's the obvious stuff: you can't avoid HF, and it's nasty stuff. You can die. But that's not what I'm the most worried about; people can make smart decisions to reduce risk, and ultimately people can make their own decisions about their risk tolerance. What I'm worried about is the SF6 for the RIE. Kg for kg, that stuff has a global warming potential of more than 24,000 TIMES the warming potential of CO2. If it's all broken down in the plasma chamber, or there's exhaust scrubbers involved like you'd have at an industrial fab, then it's no issue. But hobbyists are going to be spilling and purging a bunch of unmodified SF6. It's kind of an ecological catastrophe. Some things are better not done at home.
- Animats 2y agoNobody seems to have mentioned electron beam lithography. Hobbyists have done that.[1] E-beam lithography has been used since the 1970s. It's slow; it might take a day to make a CPU. That's why it's not used as a production process. But as a prototype process, it works fine. There are a few hobbyists doing this.[1] E-beam systems are basically scanning electron microscopes with more power. There's a vacuum chamber, means for focusing and steering an electron beam similar to what's inside a CRT, and control equipment. It's all computer-controlled, of course. This has many advantages. Software can correct for nonlinearities in the scanning. The machine can inspect what it's written by scanning at low power. You still have to coat and etch; it's not a dry process. The beam just exposes photoresist. The equipment is the size of a desk. Here's a machine at CMU.[2] Many universities have such machines. [1] https://hackaday.com/2024/08/06/creating-1%c2%b5m-features-the-hacker-way/ https://hackaday.com/2024/08/06/creating-1%c2%b5m-features-t... [2] https://nanofab.ece.cmu.edu/facilities-equipment/fei-sirion.html https://nanofab.ece.cmu.edu/facilities-equipment/fei-sirion....
- hoseja 2y agoSurely the end state of advanced computational hardware production cannot be glorified color photography? It's really weird nobody has come up with a better process.
- itomato 2y agoDiscord, though?