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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

I want Sam to turn this into a startup somehow. There has got to be something better than the semiconductor industry we have today, which has ridiculous barriers to entry.

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Turning old processes into a startup is what Melexis did 30+ years ago: they acquired obsolete fabs in Eastern(?) Europe and repurposed them to make sensors, which don’t need state of the art processes.

The 180nm open source eFabless shuttle runs that are sponsored by Google are done by X-fab, which is owned by Melexis’ founder as well.

I don’t see how this garage stuff (impressive as it is!) can be turned into a startup. It’s not as if there is some kind of breakthrough here?

I wonder if it could support specialty audio chip manufacturing.

Exit via Cirrus Logic.

A company called Alfa in Latvia does this, they use outdated semiconductor fabs (probably from Soviet union era) to make reproductions of vintage synth chips from the 80s, CEM33xx etc.

Would need a change in the environment. There's no economic reason to do it now, when we've got global supply chains and established businesses with decades of IP. There'd be a strong reason to do it if those supply chains collapsed and we needed to distribute semiconductor manufacturing across a number of separate low-profile sites, if, for example, we entered war, civil disorder, or a migration crisis.

> It’s not as if there is some kind of breakthrough here

The [potential] breakthrough is in accessibility. Like GP said, this is a non-cleanroom process. Package it up into something reproducible and sell the entire 10um node for 6 figures and you'll have a few takers (unis, high networth enthusiasts). Get it down to 5 figures and you can break into some of the hobbyist market. Iterate/improve the node from there.

The path from here to unicorn startup is not really easy to imagine, but getting from here to cottage industry has some sliver of a chance if Sam wanted to go that route.

Making demos is easy, making a product is hard.

Universities could totally do what he is doing. But that’s still far removed from commercializing this tech (unless the product is “a mini fab for universities for educational purposes only.”)

For a real product, you’d need to meet all kinds of reliability requirements: life time, voltage range, temperature range, parameter control etc.

(Once again: what he’s doing is awesome. It’s just important to keep some perspective.)

It's not strictly semiconductor-related, but if there's one thing I would like to see, it's low cost, made-to-order integrated analog computers. The low power consumption of analog devices would offset the larger feature size, and hopefully the process could be made cheap/flexible enough so that needing a different IC design for each use case would be a non-issue.

You can get your chip fabbed at the Skywater foundry for 10K (can't remember how many dies that buys you), the open source toolchain does support analog if you know what you are doing.

Larger feature size would help the power consumption in this case as well - larger distance between transistor features means less leakage which means less static power consumption. Dynamic power consumption would of course increase but that shouldn't be much of an issue with analog chips.

I was thinking about something like that too. How hard would it be to have a semiconductor-manufacturing-as-a-service with lower inertia like those PCB manufacturing services? The hobbyist affordable board houses these days generally have extremely good processes and quality that even beat some "industrial" board houses, as they're thoroughly refined by fabricating hobbyist boards with sometimes really awful DFM considerations

Masks are expensive

Which is probably why Sam's process uses a DLP projector install of masks.

A mask at this scale would just be a few hundred dollars I think (chrome on glass)?

The cheapest Taiwanese mask shops who work for discrete device manufacturers will bill you 10x at least.

You have to find the capability / price point sweet spot and you could probably create a big market, that kind of thing has been happening more and more lately... but it takes a lot of domain knowledge and luck.

A good example of this is how Arduino broke open the hobbyist electronics market which went from circuit programmers and prototype boards that would run in hundreds of dollars on the low end to $20 or something to get in at the ground level.

There are companies working on scaling e-beam lithography, which might be along the lines you're looking for [1] [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_lithography

[2] http://www.multibeamcorp.com/

Given the relative affordability of Skywater's service nowadays, I imagine we will eventually see custom silicon projects on Kickstarter and the like.

I imagine this will end up like 3D printing though.

A 3D printer is fantastic to prototype your own designs. Or to build custom parts in low volume.

But it will never replace traditional manufacturing at scale. And even CAD is a massive barrier to entry.

And 3D printing is far more useful for everyday things but we still haven’t figured out a model to make the technology accessible to the general public.

This is a very impressive project though. I’m envious.

But the model for it to be accessible to the general public is readily available, it's just not evenly distributed.

I can go to several local fed-ex offices here in Vancouver and they will print on demand a file that I provide them, for a very reasonable cost (given that they eat the cost of misprints and supervision of the process).

There are a number of fairly successful print on demand businesses that are niche specialized as well, heroforge is a great example.

That sounds more of what I am thinking of. Australia has a population of similar magnitude, but I've never heard of such a thing here.

I disagree that Heroforge is a good example of 3D printing being available to the general public. Firstly it's literally a niche product. Shapeways is more general and I've ordered from them before, but international shipping is very expensive. I can order an Ikea replacement part for $10 and then pay $27 for shipping.

Most of my designs and prints are often for very mundane things. Missing pieces or broken parts that would save you 10s or hundreds of dollars. But most people think of 3D printing as a high tech manufacturing process. Or they think of the hobby as something for making toys. Most don't fathom that you can use the technology to fix your headphones or replace a broken part.

And this is a technology that has direct application to people lives right now. Custom ICs are very cool and even more niche.

Well 3D printing is super great for fast, functional prototyping. So if that's all it is, it'd be great!

We have that problem of trusting our compilers, and the guys that are trying to build a completely clean bootstrap of gcc (?). The ability to manufacture some known-safe hardware might help that project.

> There has got to be something better than the semiconductor industry we have today, which has ridiculous barriers to entry.

I am curious about your exact meaning. When you say barriers to entry, it sounds like you're implying the "semiconductior industry we have today" is actively putting up barriers to prevent you from entering? Is that what you are trying to say? If so, please elaborate so that we can understand what these barriers you are facing are.

Or is it just that you're acknowledging that it actually costs many billions to build up a commercially viable fab?

I notice no response and yet downvotes. Parent claims there are "ridiculous barriers to entry" implying patent thickets by the "semiconductor industry we have today" or something along those lines. I can't help but notice no further explanation was provided to substantiate parent's claims.

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