"Z2" - Upgraded Homemade Silicon Chips on HackerTube: recommended by 4 Hacker News commenters across 4 separate months, 2021–2026.
demo · evergreen
Sam Zeloof shows the upgraded second iteration of his homemade silicon integrated circuit fabrication process, producing chips with around a thousand transistors in his garage. It is a short overview of what the home fab can now do.
HN uses it as the go-to proof that small-scale, hobbyist chip fabrication is real, and as an entry point to the topic.
“It's fantastic and I highly recommend watching it.”
10 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
Mentioned a couple other times in this thread but I don't think anyone has linked Sam Zeloof's video of essentially doing this: ▶ this video It's fantastic and I highly recommend watching it.
in “How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation” · View on HN
Somewhat related: a high school student creating his own semiconductor fav in his parent’s garage on a "budget". ▶ this video It’s a thoroughly interesting video, but I’m a bit disappointed he never took his idea any further than he did. I’d really love to see something like a 6502 being made at home.
in “How to build a $20B semiconductor fab” · View on HN
This was mostly about making a silicon wafer. This video shows more detail on the rest of the process in a home lab: ▶ this video (blog here: [link] )
in “How to Make a CPU – A Simple Picture Based Explanation” · View on HN
A guy named Sam Zeloof is fabbing functional chips in his garage. I think you might gain a lot from watching his videos about the process. ▶ this video
in “The Semiconductor Ecosystem Explained” · View on HN
Despite my hopes, I somewhat doubt that anyone would accept computing on the sort of chips that one could produce in their garage for less than $10,000 capital investment. You can, probably, with some effort and research, produce something analogous to the original Intel chips from the 70s in your garage using off-the-shelf tools. Sam Zeloof has blazed the trail here: ▶ this video . And for a less than a million it's not inconceivable that a municipality could produce chips that would be at home in the 90s. Maybe that would be enough for a lot of tasks, especially if you're willing to resort to hardware coprocessors for common tasks like media decoding and encryption, but it would take a huge sea change to get people to accept it, and nearly all of our software would need to be rewritten.
in “Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged” · View on HN
▶ this video Here is a video of Sam Aloof who now runs Atomic Semi with Jim Keller. It likely took thousands of dollars to make his own custom Z2 chip that only has 1200 transistors and its nowhere near the likes of the 68k or Intel 386. They might have more advanced stuff now at Atomic Semi but they haven't announced anything
in “Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business” · View on HN
It seems you're suggesting that every structure resembling a nation state will be destroyed and we'll end up in a Max Max style dystopia where books are used exclusively to start fires. This is a bit reductionist and simplistic. I'm failing to see how food shortages and displacement, even significant enough to affect a billion people, will destroy all of global civilization . There are estimated to be close to a million nuclear physics PhDs, and millions more non-PhD experts. Nuclear reactors are being constructed on every major continent. And while there is a global bottleneck for current-generation silicon, there are hobbyists who produce previous-generation microprocessors[1]. I've never disagreed that these events will be disruptive to supply chains, create shortages, stall innovation, or force us to reconstruct lost cutting-edge expertise or infrastructure. All of these seem like relatively small hiccoughs, not civilization-ending catastrophes. Recall that the Black Death, which killed nearly half of Europe, was shortly followed by the Renaissance. 1. ▶ this video
in “2023 was the hottest summer in two thousand years” · View on HN
I'm surprised I'm not hearing of more homemade/small-scale attempts like Sam Zeloof's ( ▶ this video ). Not that this is the same class of problem, but still.
in “TSMC's debacle in the desert: Missed deadlines and tension among coworkers” · View on HN
This is the best paper I've read in a long time -- this has to go in my "Top 10" favorite posts of all time on HN... (To PaulHoule: Another truly excellent post of yours to HN, thank you very much , the HN community and myself appreciate it greatly!) Anyway, let's delve into it -- here's the key quote, IMHO: >"As the previous discussion showed, SUBLEQ is, of course, not the target realization for optical computing. Its purpose is to showcase the simplest form a general-purpose optical computer could take and an intermediary step we take. It can be implemented with less than 100 logic gates and, given enough memory, able to emulate a full x86 with a graphics card running Windows and Doom™ loaded, while crunching AI models as a background task (admittedly all extremely slowly)." Now that is truly awesome! Also, it should be pointed out that if SUBLEQ could be implemented optically, it could also be implemented digitally, say, on the smallest of small gate count FPGA's... While such a FPGA Soft CPU would not be fast -- it would definitely be interesting, and probably very simple (comparatively!) to implement! (Also, it might be implementable on a tiny IC, for example, Sam Zeloof's "Z2" 1,000 gate IC: ▶ this video ) Anyway, 5+ Stars for this excellent paper! Upvoted and favorited!
in “An all-optical general-purpose CPU and optical computer architecture” · View on HN
That was actually a post here on HN just a few weeks ago. Here's one "point of entry" (to find the homepage and similar videos and pages): ▶ this video "Upgraded Homemade Silicon Chips"
in “Chip shortage leads carmaker Opel to shut German plant until 2022” · View on HN