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Making Microchips at Home - Cooking with Jeri Part1

Jeri Ellsworth · 295.6K views · 2011-07-16 · 8:53

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Overview

Jeri Ellsworth shows early steps of making microchips at home: cleaving wafers, removing native oxide, testing dopant type with a hot probe, and loading the furnace.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as the example of someone making integrated circuits at home.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2014–2023

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What people said

jgn · 2023-10 · Reference

If optics and photolithography interest you I recommend Huygens Optics on YT [0]. Jeroen, the creator, has an engrossing passion for the material. Jeri's process [1] is wild compared to Sam's lab. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]

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mrob · 2016-06 · Reference

Jeri Ellsworth has built working transistors at home. Point contact germanium BJT: [LINK] Etched silicon FET: [VIDEO] The rusty razorblade + pin point contact diode doesn't need anything special because it's a Schottky diode, with a metal/N-type semiconductor junction. If you probe lots of places you can find an N-type region where the dopant is random impurities. But the transistor needs both N and P-type regions, so I don't see any way to build one with common junk. Jeri's point contact example works by diffusing phosphorus from phosphor bronze into commercially produced N-type germanium using a high current to heat it. Phosphor bronze is arguably household junk but I don't think germanium diodes are.

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kragen · 2015-11 · Reference

So it seems like he didn't actually succeed in making the pencil from scratch, or if he did, he didn't blog about it. He did successfully make it to mining the graphite, which is more widely distributed than I would have thought: [LINK] Other related projects include: Thomas Thwaites making a toaster from scratch: [LINK] That guy who made a ceramic-tile-roofed house with underfloor heating from scratch just posted about adding a kiln and firing more pots: [LINK] This one is really "from scratch"; he starts the project (in a previous video) by making stone tools from rocks he found onsite. kd5bjo points out, "Don't forget the Gingery book series on how to build a machine shop!" They build a machine shop starting from scrap metal, starting with a charcoal foundry for casting aluminum and pot metal; there's now a US$75 hardbound edition of what was originally a seven-book series. [LINK] Jeri Ellsworth demonstrating how to make integrated circuits at home: [VIDEO] The Global Village Construction Set is working on a set of 50 machine designs capable of reproducing themselves: [LINK] Of course we all know about the RepRap project that spawned the current proliferation of 3-D printer companies. Project Oberon is one of a few different projects that has a whole self-hosting toolchain including CPU architecture, compiler, networking, GUI, filesystem, and applications in a form comprehensible by a single person; it's free software: [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Jeri Ellsworth, played through YouTube.

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