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Until we have affordable photolithography machines (which would be cool!), hardware is never really going to be open.

by rwmj 1y ago

reactordev 1y ago
The next 3D print revolution, photolithography your own chip wafers at home. Now that would be something! I doubt anyone here has a clean enough room.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  Jeri Ellsworth has that covered. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Insane… I thought I was smart, she proves me wrong.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      Peter Norvig, Fabrice Bellard, etc. The list of ultra smart people is quite long. A friend of mine thought he was pretty smart (and I would have happily agreed with him). Then he went to work for Google (early days). It didn't take long for him to realize that the only reason he seemed very smart was that he simply wasn't seeing a large enough slice of humanity.
- quantummagic 1y ago
  > I doubt anyone here has a clean enough room. Jordan Peterson has entered the building...
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    Maybe if he cleaned his own room, he’d find his copy of the Communist Manifesto in time to read it for a scheduled debate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsHJ3LvUWTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsHJ3LvUWTs
  - lioeters 1y ago
    "Clean your rooms, men!" Starts sobbing
phkahler 1y ago
>> Until we have affordable photolithography.... If that comes to pass we will want software that run on earlier nodes and 32bit hardware.
15155 1y ago
> affordable photolithography machines We'll likely never have "affordable" photolithography, but electron beam lithography will become obtainable in my lifetime (and already is, DIY, to some degree.)
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago
  depends on what one means by affordable, but DIY versions have been successfully attempted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg
  - adrian_b 1y ago
    Making at home transistors, or even small-scale integrated circuits is not exceedingly difficult. However, making at home a useful microcontroller or FPGA would require not only an electron-beam lithography machine, but also a ion-implantation machine, a diffusion furnace, a plasma-etch machine, a sputtering machine and a lot of other chemical equipment and measurement instruments. All the equipment would have to be enclosed in a sealed room, with completely automated operation. A miniature mask-less single-wafer processing fab could be made at a cost several orders of magnitude less than a real semiconductor fab, but the cost would still be of many millions of $. With such a miniature fab, one might need a few weeks to produce a batch of IC's worth maybe $1000, so the cost of the equipment will never be recovered, which is why nobody does such a thing for commercial purposes. In order to have distributed semiconductor fabs serving small communities around them, instead of having only a couple of fabs for the entire planet, one would need a revolution in the fabrication of the semiconductor manufacturing equipment itself, like SpaceX has done for rockets. Only if the semiconductor manufacturing equipment would be the result of a completely automated mass production, which would reduce its cost by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, affordable small-scale but state-of-the-art fabs would be possible. But such an evolution is contrary to everything that the big companies have done during the last 30 years, during which all smaller competitors have been eliminated, the production has become concentrated in quasi-monopolies and for the non-consumer products the companies now offer every year more and more expensive models, which are increasingly affordable only for other big companies and not for individuals or small businesses.
greesil 1y ago
Why not run on an FPGA?
- bigiain 1y ago
  That's being tried: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor "The principle of evidence-based trust was at work in our decision to implement Precursor’s brain as an SoC on an FPGA, which means you can compile your CPU from design source and verify for yourself that Precursor contains no hidden instructions or other backdoors. Accomplishing the equivalent level of inspection on a piece of hardwired silicon would be…a rather expensive proposition. Precursor’s mainboard was designed for easy inspection as well, and even its LCD and keyboard were chosen specifically because they facilitate verification of proper construction with minimal equipment." See also: https://betrusted.io https://betrusted.io
- pjc50 1y ago
  This is somewhere in the 10x-100x more expensive and consumes much more power, for lower effective clock speeds. It's not a production solution.
- mardifoufs 1y ago
  In addition to what the other comments have already highlighted, there's also the fact that you'd be back to using extremely opaque, even less "open source" hardware than regular CPUs/MCUs. Almost every FPGA that could even conceivably be used to run general purpose software is locked behind super proprietary stacks
Someone 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law: “Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years” Wafer machines from the 1970s could be fairly cheap today, if there were sufficient demand for chips from the 1970s (~1MHz, no power states, 16 bit if you’re lucky, etc), but that trend would have to stop and reverse significantly for affordable wafer factories for modern hardware to be a thing.

Until we have affordable photolithography machines (which would be cool!), hardware is never really going to be open.

by rwmj 1y ago

Until we have affordable photolithography machines (which would be cool!), hardware is never really going to be open.

The next 3D print revolution, photolithography your own chip wafers at home. Now that would be something! I doubt anyone here has a clean enough room.

jacquesm 1y ago
Jeri Ellsworth has that covered. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM
- reactordev 1y ago
  Insane… I thought I was smart, she proves me wrong.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    Peter Norvig, Fabrice Bellard, etc. The list of ultra smart people is quite long. A friend of mine thought he was pretty smart (and I would have happily agreed with him). Then he went to work for Google (early days). It didn't take long for him to realize that the only reason he seemed very smart was that he simply wasn't seeing a large enough slice of humanity.
quantummagic 1y ago
> I doubt anyone here has a clean enough room. Jordan Peterson has entered the building...
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  Maybe if he cleaned his own room, he’d find his copy of the Communist Manifesto in time to read it for a scheduled debate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsHJ3LvUWTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsHJ3LvUWTs
- lioeters 1y ago
  "Clean your rooms, men!" Starts sobbing

phkahler 1y ago

>> Until we have affordable photolithography.... If that comes to pass we will want software that run on earlier nodes and 32bit hardware.

15155 1y ago

> affordable photolithography machines We'll likely never have "affordable" photolithography, but electron beam lithography will become obtainable in my lifetime (and already is, DIY, to some degree.)

NooneAtAll3 1y ago
depends on what one means by affordable, but DIY versions have been successfully attempted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg
- adrian_b 1y ago
  Making at home transistors, or even small-scale integrated circuits is not exceedingly difficult. However, making at home a useful microcontroller or FPGA would require not only an electron-beam lithography machine, but also a ion-implantation machine, a diffusion furnace, a plasma-etch machine, a sputtering machine and a lot of other chemical equipment and measurement instruments. All the equipment would have to be enclosed in a sealed room, with completely automated operation. A miniature mask-less single-wafer processing fab could be made at a cost several orders of magnitude less than a real semiconductor fab, but the cost would still be of many millions of $. With such a miniature fab, one might need a few weeks to produce a batch of IC's worth maybe $1000, so the cost of the equipment will never be recovered, which is why nobody does such a thing for commercial purposes. In order to have distributed semiconductor fabs serving small communities around them, instead of having only a couple of fabs for the entire planet, one would need a revolution in the fabrication of the semiconductor manufacturing equipment itself, like SpaceX has done for rockets. Only if the semiconductor manufacturing equipment would be the result of a completely automated mass production, which would reduce its cost by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, affordable small-scale but state-of-the-art fabs would be possible. But such an evolution is contrary to everything that the big companies have done during the last 30 years, during which all smaller competitors have been eliminated, the production has become concentrated in quasi-monopolies and for the non-consumer products the companies now offer every year more and more expensive models, which are increasingly affordable only for other big companies and not for individuals or small businesses.

greesil 1y ago

Why not run on an FPGA?

bigiain 1y ago
That's being tried: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor "The principle of evidence-based trust was at work in our decision to implement Precursor’s brain as an SoC on an FPGA, which means you can compile your CPU from design source and verify for yourself that Precursor contains no hidden instructions or other backdoors. Accomplishing the equivalent level of inspection on a piece of hardwired silicon would be…a rather expensive proposition. Precursor’s mainboard was designed for easy inspection as well, and even its LCD and keyboard were chosen specifically because they facilitate verification of proper construction with minimal equipment." See also: https://betrusted.io https://betrusted.io
pjc50 1y ago
This is somewhere in the 10x-100x more expensive and consumes much more power, for lower effective clock speeds. It's not a production solution.
mardifoufs 1y ago
In addition to what the other comments have already highlighted, there's also the fact that you'd be back to using extremely opaque, even less "open source" hardware than regular CPUs/MCUs. Almost every FPGA that could even conceivably be used to run general purpose software is locked behind super proprietary stacks

Someone 1y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law: “Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years” Wafer machines from the 1970s could be fairly cheap today, if there were sufficient demand for chips from the 1970s (~1MHz, no power states, 16 bit if you’re lucky, etc), but that trend would have to stop and reverse significantly for affordable wafer factories for modern hardware to be a thing.