Currently, only one company in the world – ASML – has the technological capability necessary for the creation of photolithography machines which are sufficient for the production of modern semiconductor devices. What I’m wondering is at what point does semiconductor manufacturing become practical, or even feesible for small organizations, or independents? One must be able to surpass the cost of the machines, and the resources necessary to manufacture them. I presume that a company like ASML is also extremely picky – willfully, or by regulation, or otherwise – about who they lend their technology to.
I’m not sure if this is the right community for this sort of post. Please let me know if not, and if there is a more suitable place to put it.
You might be interested in the YouTube channel ProjectsInFlight, which is currently trying to build a DIY solution for fabbing simple ICs in their garage & documenting the process on YouTube.
CMOS silicon logic can be chemically “printed” using photolithography and commercially available mercury lamps. From the wikipedia article, if I read between the lines those are good down to feature sizes of about 1 micron (1.0µM or 1000nm), limited of course by the accuracy of your wafer setups between processes and the printing of your lithography plates. this is the process used to produce the Intel 80486 which fit 1 million transistors on a chip. seems that laser lithography using KrF lasers can be good down to much smaller but your litho plates become the limiting factor.
so, conservatively- 1µm features would be attainable for a sort of “home brew” startup with little to no venture funding but the correct industrial knowledge. with more funding though i’d guess older laser lithography machines would be attainable on the used market and potentially usable down to 0.4µm or smaller.
There is an answer but you’ll probably only manage to get it by going through semiconductor devices history and determining the hardware required at each improvement step, and the cost and acquirability of that hardware. This would take hours - potentially days - of research.
A quick search yielded this blog post though of someone attempting - and managing - production of a basic 1200-transistors semiconductor device in their garage, which I found rather neat. That’s with no cleanroom, and with chemicals the purity of which are far removed from the ones the industry uses.
which I found rather neat
I concur, what a great post. Special software for the layout? Please! I’ve got a photoshop license, it’ll have to do.
The rest of us get our calculators at staples, this guy buys the components at the chemical supply store.
And once small-scale semiconductor manufacturing becomes easier and more feasible, we will have “OpenChipCAD” or something like that.
We’ve had open-source chip design software since the 1980s. Magic VLSI, for example. There are quite a few OSS tools for various parts of the chip design process.
