remember when JLCPCB became popular a few years ago and completely flipped hobby electronics upside down? I don't know how possible it is but it would be really cool if that happens in a few years with semiconductors. it's kind of mad that they've dominated our lives since the 1970s but you can only make them if you're a large company with millions of dollars (or several years, a big garage and lots of equipment as seen here). or tiny tapeout.

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mepian 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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mitthrowaway2 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Why?

It seems to me that if there were as much of a customer base for custom ICs as there is for PCBs, a fabricator like TSMC could easily offer a batch prototyping service on a 28 nm node, where you buy just a small slice of a wafer, provided you keep to some restrictive design and packaging rules.

	▲	shash 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They already do offer that - it’s called a multi-project wafer or MPW. But it’s prohibitively expensive on a per-chip basis. It’s mostly used for prototyping or concept proving and not for commercial use. One problem is, you need to create a photolithography mask set for any volume size of fabrication and those aren’t cheap. But that’s far from the _only_ problem with small volume.

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wiseepidemic 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://developers.google.com/silicon

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matheusmoreira 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.