It's really amazing, great work! And please keep sharing progress and, if you want, how can other people follow on your footsteps!

Personally I agree, but the world doesn't seem to. Their first project (https://sam.zeloof.xyz/first-ic/) was all the way back in 2018, and it doesn't seem like it changed all too much (yet), while since I read the first blog post in 2018, I also thought we would have reached a much more mature DIY ecosystem by now.

Don't get me wrong, I'm excited too about it, and can't wait to personally do some experiments as well, although not at the same scale. But I'm not sure it's world changing, at least until I've actually seen any changes :)

There is a great video on creating lithographic masks on Ben Krasnow's Applied Science channel - https://youtu.be/YAPt_DcWAvw?si=RXaS-GY7czqo_TJZ

The photographic steps are pretty accessible.

Silk screen printing is probably the easiest way to introduce the concepts to kids. There are a lot of maker spaces/artist collectives and classes that have the basic tools and resources to do it.

Cyanotype Paper is safe fun for kids to try Sun printing silhouettes.

Another project is growing large salt crystals in saturated solution.

The Unitech Electric Static Wand Toy off amazon was also popular last year (poorly built mini Van de Graaff generator.)

Glow in the dark wall paint and a 5 second strobe light is also a classic silhouette demo.

Could also look for linear polarizing sheets, thermochromic sheets, and "Magnetic Viewing film".

Some will like this stuff, others only want to stare at a screen. =3

It's not technologically feasible unless plastic aka flexible ICs take off.

This is an absolutely vital development for our computing freedom. Billion dollar industrial fabs are single points of failure, they can be regulated, subverted, enshittified by market forces. We need the ability to make our own hardware at home, just like we can make our own freedom respecting software at home.

The semiconductor device industry and Silicon Valley would have never appeared if the early companies working in this field would have been controlled by people obsessed about secrecy and "IP protection".

During the fifties and the sixties, and even until the early seventies, it was common for everyone to publish research papers very unlike those that are published today, where the concrete information is minimal.

In the early research papers about semiconductor devices and integrated circuits, it was normal to give complete recipes, including quantities of chemicals, temperatures and times for the processing steps and so on. After reading such papers, you could reproduce the recipes and make the device described and you could measure for yourself to see how true are the claims presented in the paper.

That open sharing of information has led to a very quick evolution of the semiconductor technologies during the early years, until more traditional business-oriented management has begun to restrict the information provided to the public.

It is said that such sharing of information still exists in China in many fields, and it is the source of their rapid progress.

You could make in a garage some decent analog integrated circuits, e.g. audio amplifiers or operational amplifiers or even radio-frequency circuits for not too high frequency ranges.

However you cannot make useful digital circuits. For digital circuits, the best that you can do is to be content to only design them and buy an FPGA for implementing them, instead of attempting to manufacture a custom IC.

With the kind of digital circuits that you could make in a garage, the most complex thing that you could do would be something like a very big table or wall digital clock, made not with a single IC like today, but with a few dozen ICs.

Anything more complex than that would need far too many ICs.

oh man, I remember hearing about this back then and I got excited that there had been an update. From what I hear he’s gone off to college now but will hopefully be back to cooking up semiconductors once he graduates

One of the cofounders it seems https://atomicsemi.com/about/

Does that name make childish Americans giggle in the same way as this childish Brit?

Had no idea he'd started a company, always found his blog posts so inspirational. Really hope he succeeds!

It’s heartbreaking.

I’m curious on the details. Isn’t marrying a citizen an instant path to residency and presumably rather quick way to get authorized for work? Are they holding him for having previously been in the states on an expired visa?

Enforcing the law is not anti-immigramt insanity.

It’s also worth seeing how many US superfund sites are on former chip fabs. Intel, AMD, Fairchild etc. all just dumped things down the drains.

Regulations can be bad but they can also stop environmental disasters from happening.

Of note, Sam’s co-founder in Atomic Semi is none other than Jim Keller (!)

Is the "regulation bad" / "Europe bad" angle actually relevant here, or did you just take the opportunity to use this thread as your soapbox?

As much as I hate to say it Substrate is probably a fraud

https://www.reddit.com/r/Semiconductors/s/jpuI772PJB

If Europe has an overregulation problem, the US may also have a grifter problem