5 ms·

Has anyone tried to replicate this? Seems like it would be very useful for amateur makers/hackers were it not for the $23k printer cost (no idea for the cost of

Has anyone tried to replicate this? Seems like it would be very useful for amateur makers/hackers were it not for the $23k printer cost (no idea for the cost of the discussed silver ink). But surely someone crazy had access to one and tried or has tried to replicate on a cheaper printer? I figure HN has a decent chance of helping find said persons?

superb_dev 2y ago
I don’t think they’ve tried it yet, but it’s seems up the alley of Applied Science on YouTube
- godelski 2y ago
  I'm not sure this is Ben's forte, but you're right that I wouldn't be surprised if he tries it, though he has done some circuit stuff[0,1] so nothing would surprise me from him. (Hi Ben! Love the work!) BUT I do think this is something Sam Zeloof[2] try. He's done some lithography using a projector[3]. Also there's Jeri Ellsworth, but I think she's shifted to mostly working with her AR project. Tons of old videos on that stuff if you're into it. Side note: I'm assuming anyone who knows any of these people would be interested that a new Dan Gelbart video just dropped[5]! ----------------------------------------- Other side note: @YouTube people (and @GoogleSearch), can we talk about search? The updates have been progressively making it harder to find these types of accounts. People who do *highly* technical things. I get that these are aimed at extremely specific audiences but this type of information is some of the most valuable information on the planet. Lots of knowledge is locked into people's heads and these classes of videos are one of the biggest booms to knowledge distribution we've ever seen in the course of humanity. I understand that this does not directly lead to profits to YouTube (certainly it DOES for Google Search), but indirectly it does (keeps these users on your platform!) and has a high benefit to humanity in general. The beauty of YouTube and Google was you could access anything. That we recognized everyone was different and we could find like minded people in a vast sea. The problem search was meant to solve was to get us access to hard to find things. To find needles in ever growing haystacks! Please, I really do not want to return to the days of pre-search. Nor even early search! It should be _easier_ to find niche topics these days, not harder. LLMs aren't going to fix this. This is becoming an existential crisis and it needs to be resolved. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIqhpxul_og https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIqhpxul_og [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYgIuc-VqHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYgIuc-VqHE [2] https://www.youtube.com/@SamZeloof https://www.youtube.com/@SamZeloof [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVoldtNpIzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVoldtNpIzI [4] https://www.youtube.com/@JeriEllsworthJabber https://www.youtube.com/@JeriEllsworthJabber [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuZjjActWmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuZjjActWmQ
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    LLMs could help if they were specifically applied to the task [1], however people are actually applying them to the generation of countless slop videos. Google's problem, which I think there is no cure for, is that Google believes it is #1 and to quote Fatboy Slim "We're #1 why try harder?" If in some way they feel they have competition it is to be a 2nd rate TikTok, not be a better version of what made YouTube great. In the meantime, for everybody that's been turned on to something really awesome and creative on YouTube somebody else got turned on to something really toxic. [1] Something significant happens every 10 years in search relevance, and SBERT was one of those.
    - ezst 2y ago
      Again someone mistaking LLMs with knowledge bases. Must be a day finishing in `y`
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        The original misunderstanding behind "knowledge base" was that, in the 1980s, it was an idea in symbolic AI that you'd develop a set of facts against an ontology designed for accurate inference and somehow by the 1990s it became a text repository with a search engine that may or may not work. Occasionally useful, sometimes hard to distinguish from a trash can. See Confluence. Prompt engineers with their decoder models are going to always be wondering why they are always a bridesmaid and never a bride, with encoder models you can attain the holy grail of the system where you put text in one side and get, within calibrated accuracy, facts to put into the first kind of knowledge base. Or, for that matter, a good search engine for the second kind of knowledge base which could raise it above the "trash can" level.
        ezst 2y ago
        "Funny" how that reminisces of the whole blockchain discussion. If the need is fully satisfied by a "boring" and cost-effective "facts" database, why would an adequate engineer push for (blockchain/)LLM instead?
philipkglass 2y ago
It's possible that the inkjet printed transistor is both replicable and impractical for building a full microprocessor. The inkjet transistor article says "A total of 216 devices were tested with a yield of greater than 95%, thus demonstrating the true scalability of the process for achieving integrated systems." But 95% yield on the transistor level implies vanishingly low yield at the device level when you need thousands of transistors to build a full microprocessor. Even the new MoS2 microprocessor discussed in the Ars article wasn't fabricated all at once. It was built up from sub-components like shift registers containing fewer transistors, then those components were combined to make a full microprocessor. See for example "Supplementary Fig. 7 | Yield analysis of wafer-level 8-bit registers." in the supplementary information: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-025-08759-9/MediaObjects/41586_2025_8759_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415... The yield of 8-bit registers, each consisting of 144 transistors, can reach 71% on the wafer.
- godelski 2y ago
  My knowledge of transistors is pretty limited[0]. Does the yield percentage refer to number of successful chips on a substrate or look more at the total number of successful transistors? (Or confusing hybrid-term like rain forecasts) I believe your comment implies the latter? So the number of successful processors is quite low? How many failed transistors can you have in a working microprocessor? (Probably not an easy to answer question?) [0] Am I remembering correctly that this is your area?
  - Out_of_Characte 2y ago
    Yield would be the amount of functioning chips. This may be chips, entire packages or even a complexer answere where good chips also need to be below certain leakage. Cores and caches could be disabled and the list of potential yield increasing tooling is always increasing when wafers nowadays costs thousands of dollars.
  - notjoemama 2y ago
    I’ll add chip designers add redundancy. When errors are detected in testing, they can disable sections of the chip by lasering fuses. That allows routing the circuit through a higher quality area. Quality is measured by not only that the circuit produces correct data but also within tolerances of timing and voltage. IIRC RAM is approximately 10% redundant. A good quality chip will use what meets the spec and leave good transistors unused. A poor quality chip will disable bad ones and only use the ones that meet spec.

superb_dev 2y ago

I don’t think they’ve tried it yet, but it’s seems up the alley of Applied Science on YouTube

godelski 2y ago
I'm not sure this is Ben's forte, but you're right that I wouldn't be surprised if he tries it, though he has done some circuit stuff[0,1] so nothing would surprise me from him. (Hi Ben! Love the work!) BUT I do think this is something Sam Zeloof[2] try. He's done some lithography using a projector[3]. Also there's Jeri Ellsworth, but I think she's shifted to mostly working with her AR project. Tons of old videos on that stuff if you're into it. Side note: I'm assuming anyone who knows any of these people would be interested that a new Dan Gelbart video just dropped[5]! ----------------------------------------- Other side note: @YouTube people (and @GoogleSearch), can we talk about search? The updates have been progressively making it harder to find these types of accounts. People who do *highly* technical things. I get that these are aimed at extremely specific audiences but this type of information is some of the most valuable information on the planet. Lots of knowledge is locked into people's heads and these classes of videos are one of the biggest booms to knowledge distribution we've ever seen in the course of humanity. I understand that this does not directly lead to profits to YouTube (certainly it DOES for Google Search), but indirectly it does (keeps these users on your platform!) and has a high benefit to humanity in general. The beauty of YouTube and Google was you could access anything. That we recognized everyone was different and we could find like minded people in a vast sea. The problem search was meant to solve was to get us access to hard to find things. To find needles in ever growing haystacks! Please, I really do not want to return to the days of pre-search. Nor even early search! It should be _easier_ to find niche topics these days, not harder. LLMs aren't going to fix this. This is becoming an existential crisis and it needs to be resolved. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIqhpxul_og https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIqhpxul_og [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYgIuc-VqHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYgIuc-VqHE [2] https://www.youtube.com/@SamZeloof https://www.youtube.com/@SamZeloof [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVoldtNpIzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVoldtNpIzI [4] https://www.youtube.com/@JeriEllsworthJabber https://www.youtube.com/@JeriEllsworthJabber [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuZjjActWmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuZjjActWmQ
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  LLMs could help if they were specifically applied to the task [1], however people are actually applying them to the generation of countless slop videos. Google's problem, which I think there is no cure for, is that Google believes it is #1 and to quote Fatboy Slim "We're #1 why try harder?" If in some way they feel they have competition it is to be a 2nd rate TikTok, not be a better version of what made YouTube great. In the meantime, for everybody that's been turned on to something really awesome and creative on YouTube somebody else got turned on to something really toxic. [1] Something significant happens every 10 years in search relevance, and SBERT was one of those.
  - ezst 2y ago
    Again someone mistaking LLMs with knowledge bases. Must be a day finishing in `y`
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      The original misunderstanding behind "knowledge base" was that, in the 1980s, it was an idea in symbolic AI that you'd develop a set of facts against an ontology designed for accurate inference and somehow by the 1990s it became a text repository with a search engine that may or may not work. Occasionally useful, sometimes hard to distinguish from a trash can. See Confluence. Prompt engineers with their decoder models are going to always be wondering why they are always a bridesmaid and never a bride, with encoder models you can attain the holy grail of the system where you put text in one side and get, within calibrated accuracy, facts to put into the first kind of knowledge base. Or, for that matter, a good search engine for the second kind of knowledge base which could raise it above the "trash can" level.
      - ezst 2y ago
        "Funny" how that reminisces of the whole blockchain discussion. If the need is fully satisfied by a "boring" and cost-effective "facts" database, why would an adequate engineer push for (blockchain/)LLM instead?

philipkglass 2y ago

It's possible that the inkjet printed transistor is both replicable and impractical for building a full microprocessor. The inkjet transistor article says "A total of 216 devices were tested with a yield of greater than 95%, thus demonstrating the true scalability of the process for achieving integrated systems." But 95% yield on the transistor level implies vanishingly low yield at the device level when you need thousands of transistors to build a full microprocessor. Even the new MoS2 microprocessor discussed in the Ars article wasn't fabricated all at once. It was built up from sub-components like shift registers containing fewer transistors, then those components were combined to make a full microprocessor. See for example "Supplementary Fig. 7 | Yield analysis of wafer-level 8-bit registers." in the supplementary information: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-025-08759-9/MediaObjects/41586_2025_8759_MOESM1_ESM.pdf https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415... The yield of 8-bit registers, each consisting of 144 transistors, can reach 71% on the wafer.

godelski 2y ago
My knowledge of transistors is pretty limited[0]. Does the yield percentage refer to number of successful chips on a substrate or look more at the total number of successful transistors? (Or confusing hybrid-term like rain forecasts) I believe your comment implies the latter? So the number of successful processors is quite low? How many failed transistors can you have in a working microprocessor? (Probably not an easy to answer question?) [0] Am I remembering correctly that this is your area?
- Out_of_Characte 2y ago
  Yield would be the amount of functioning chips. This may be chips, entire packages or even a complexer answere where good chips also need to be below certain leakage. Cores and caches could be disabled and the list of potential yield increasing tooling is always increasing when wafers nowadays costs thousands of dollars.
- notjoemama 2y ago
  I’ll add chip designers add redundancy. When errors are detected in testing, they can disable sections of the chip by lasering fuses. That allows routing the circuit through a higher quality area. Quality is measured by not only that the circuit produces correct data but also within tolerances of timing and voltage. IIRC RAM is approximately 10% redundant. A good quality chip will use what meets the spec and leave good transistors unused. A poor quality chip will disable bad ones and only use the ones that meet spec.