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University labs (with the right funding) can totally do this, it's just not cheap. My university sold all its fab hardware to another university the year before
by duped 2y ago
University labs (with the right funding) can totally do this, it's just not cheap. My university sold all its fab hardware to another university the year before I was able to take a VLSI class which at the time, had a practical lab. *
> As I read more about the dark art of IC fabrication
I want to push back on this being a "dark art" - there is no magic in engineering (nb4, any sufficiently advanced technology etc etc). It's a skillset that requires education, experience, and expertise on par with anything we do in other areas of engineering. The stakes are just a little higher than software because you're dealing with the physical world and physical things have tangible costs and/or danger.
The thing that may trip people up is that IC fabrication is one of those things that doesn't really have a hobbyist tier. Anything beyond a toy requires multiple people and support staff in addition to gear and raw materials that are hard to get as any old civilian - in addition to the clean room facilities. Like the reason my university closed their lab was partly because the grad/PhD students and professors had moved on, and partly because it was becoming more difficult to source wafers for research institutions that they could actually use (everyone got hired by labs in industry, where they were making their own wafers or buying them wholesale afaict).
* iirc only the penultimate project got taped out and fabbed with terrible yields due to time contraints
- jancsika 2y ago> I want to push back on this being a "dark art" - there is no magic in engineering (nb4, any sufficiently advanced technology etc etc). It's a skillset that requires education, experience, and expertise on par with anything we do in other areas of engineering. The stakes are just a little higher than software because you're dealing with the physical world and physical things have tangible costs and/or danger. I think "engineering" in software generally means optimizing a path to a targeted set of behaviors so that the piles of garbage underneath don't end up blocking their execution for eternity. Our starting point is therefore different. You ought to somehow be working around all the physical piles of dust and patchwork of fires that must be constantly igniting inside your laser machinery. I picture it something like the mad surgeon in Minority Report, creating a small transient sterile environment to do illegal eye surgery in a room full of filth. In that light your "art" looks "dark."
- ackbar03 2y agoI don't really know much about ic manufacturing. Are you sure university labs are really able to to this? If so how come only a few companies like tsmc and that one Dutch company are able to manufacture microchips? Or are those two completely different things and I'm just confusing myself?
- johnny22 2y agothat dutch company makes machines involved in creating the ICs, not the ICs themselves.
- mercurywells 2y agonot even that, they really make the machines that make the patterns that are used to develop the electronic circuits on the ICs
- denotational 2y agoI’m not sure that’s accurate: ASML don’t make masks (i.e. the patterns), they make the EUV photolithography machines that are used in conjunction with the masks. The physical masks themselves are usually made by Hoya, and the technology to actually etch the masks is made by Veevo.
- undersuit 2y agoSemiconductor Fabs have come a long way. The Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory opened for business in a small commercial lot in Mountain View in 1956. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Shockley-Semiconductor-Laboratory-of-Beckman-Instruments-at-391-San-Antonio-Road_fig26_323225181 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Shockley-Semiconductor-L... There was lots of older or used equipment Universities could buy before Fabs started being millions of square feet with hundreds of million dollar pieces of equipment.
- km3r 2y agoThere is a wide gap between TSMC's cutting edge processes and what a university lab would produce. The features on the microchip go from a couple nanometers (TMSC cutting edge) to tens of micrometers (1000-10000x larger). Large size means less transistors, but million instead of billions still is plenty for large complex chips, just not cutting edge.
- shawndrost 2y agoIt seems you have convinced me that IC fabrication is a dark art, despite your intentions.