22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage
wired.com
wired.com
Look at what he did:
> Photolithography machines are expensive—up to $150 million—and so Zeloof made his own by bolting a modified conference room projector bought on Amazon onto a microscope. It projects his designs at tiny scale onto silicon wafers that Zeloof coats in material sensitive to ultraviolet light.
> One of Zeloof’s best finds was a broken electron microscope that cost $250,000 in the early ’90s; he bought it for $1,000 and repaired it. He uses it to inspect his chips for flaws, as well as the nanostructures on butterfly wings.
Damn this guy is good.
Regarding the custom photolithography machine, I recall seeing some pictures of chip workers from the 70s that essentially did the same thing.
A group of women (I'm pretty sure it was all women) were responsible for manually drawing out (actually more like cutting out) the chip designs on these big sheets, which were then projected down to create the photoresist masks.
That is not to take anything away from his achievements. This kid's kicking ass.
That said this man is a genius!
Probably just used warez from torrents like everyone else did when they were that age.
It's beyond obvious, though, that having good resources is helpful and opens this kind of thing up to a larger number of participants.
The entire purpose of mentioning his privilege at all is to take away from his achievements. Otherwise, why mention it. Surely it is obvious to all who read the article that you would have had to have access to capital to do what he did?
For the record: I'm not sure how much more clear I can be, but I do not feel that it takes away from his achievements whatsoever. I made my statement in reply to another poster who seemed to have the impression that this level of opportunity was the norm in America. That was the full extent of my "purpose."
I really don’t know where you got this mindset but it’s 100% not true. I know many parents who throw many resources at their kids whenever their kids show even slight interest in something. Even if they don’t show interest in many things - they still get great access.
He also has a patreon account linked on there.
Like yes that is a sizeable sum of money worthy of consideration but it's not at all prohibitive or unusual for a middle class family.
(also, a lot of working class Asian families invest heavily into music)
A decent quality upright piano is about $10000.
Some kids have go karting or motorcycle racing hobbies. Some have archery, golf, etc. They all cost a lot of money over time. Hell, some kids sail! That's really not cheap.
So not much of the middle class.
However, that garage space alone is expensive. It's larger than many small hackerspaces.
I know of very few children who have access to that much lab/storage space all to themselves.
I want my kid to start early on something he is interested in too but I don't really know how to do that. I know the general rules (expose him to a lot of stuffs, watch him do things, etc.) but don't know how to implement them properly. I myself wasted a lot of time in my childhood so I guess that's why I don't know how to do it properly.
Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen first met as teenagers in the late 1960s at Lakeside School in Seattle, when Gates was in eighth grade and Allen was in tenth grade.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/microsoft-co-founders-bill-g...
See also Levy: "Inside Bill's Brain Calls BS on Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers Theory":
Inside Bill's Brain lays the Gladwell Theorem to waste. By delving into Gates' very early life, Guggenheim reveals that, basically, Bill Gates arrived on Earth as a Martian. From the instant baby Gates joined his well-off clan, he understood there was a giant impedance mismatch between his cosmic intellect and that of the world. There's an amazing moment when he recounts the time his parents had him take a test to get into an exclusive private school for the sixth grade. He asked himself, did he want to go, figuring that if not, he would purposely blow the test.
He also chased programming like a starved Tiger, doing things like looking through corporate trash bins for source listings and that sort of stuff. Not to mention that Allen was also a person of extreme intellect and Ballmer is actually a mathematician combined with a charismatic business brain and a small nuclear reactor in one.
"Zeloof says he doesn’t know for sure what he wants to do after graduating this spring" - I hope we don't hear later that he went to work for FAANG. One the saddest things about Big Tech is how they take young talent away from innovative, potentially competing enterprises and into busy work internal projects just because they can.
If governments really wanted to prioritise innovation, they should consider giving a banker's salary to a research scientist.
They also fund startups which may be used for national interests and so on.
Much of the time, they contact you, not the other way around.
Lived and worked in D.C. and have a TS/SCI, sat for FSP…. The IC doesn’t pay even close to big tech rates. There is also no mystery around someone contacting you, just apply to the NSA / CIA / etc. if those paths pique your interest.
Startups working on IC-relevant tech getting funding via non-traditional means is absolutely true but not guaranteed.
That was 30 years ago, though. Could be completely different now.
As the person senior leadership communicates with this person is seen as more important than they are. Senior leadership wants to maintain a leveling system to separate groups of people. It's a hedge a flat organization which makes senior leadership less important.
You could swap out this person with another without losing speed but it doesn't work as well with an engineer.
It's not that management is dumb, it's that every layer of management is self-interested. Every hierarchy has to contend with principal agent problems. Organizations can do a better or worse job of it, but the incentives are always there and they lead to predictable inefficiencies which are frequently observed. Everyone knows this, but unless you know how to get someone to manage without self-interest, you aren't in a position to solve the problem. Nobody is. That's why it lingers.
You can play semantic games about whether or not it should be called inefficiency -- I don't really care what you call it -- but the RfR / Dilbert dynamic is very real and very prevalent.
Middle management becomes necessary.
But the question is around pay. Should they always make more because they sit higher in the org chart?
I would suggest they make more because of power structures not utility or because they are not as easy to replace.
Because of first class shares, senior leadership shares percentages shareholders with a vote are often the people in power. Common shareholders don't hold much power.
Let's not forget that companies aren't real sentient beings, do not really take decisions and do not really have their own interest. They are legal fictions. Trying to understand the behavior of a company based on its self interest can therefore be misleading.
Why do bureaucracies develop? Why is Google launching yet another chat app? Why are so many companies disrupted by new techs instead of adapting? All this is against their interest after all.
Companies are ultimately led and controlled by many individuals, in pursuit of their own individual interest (mostly). Some groups of individuals within a company have more control than others, and will consequently bend the company toward what's in their own interest.
I'm not versed into sociology of organisations, but from a cursory look at some big corp internals it seems to me that this easily explains the frequent growth in numbers and importance of the coterie with the more agency over hiring, regardless of whether it's good or bad for the company as a whole, ie the growth of middle management cancer.
Naturally, reality is a bit of both, but people on top push LVC hard while they never mention RfR. A good leader earns their salary multiples over, but many poor leaders rake in the dough just from RfR.
Of course some random idiot nagging the engineers won't be worth much, they need to be experts at the specific business and domain to bring value in this situation. Which also makes them harder to replace.
Certainly, companies with engineers who are capable and independet problem-solvers, and who are experts at the company's needs and the domain it operates in, are the most valuable. These are not uncommon either. But a fast-growing company in a fast-growing industry has zero chance of solely hiring such people. They need to widen their net to people that require managing.
Intra-firm compensation is not nearly as "rational" as you are making it out to be.
Google's net profit was $40B in 2020. Apple's was $94.6B in 2021. (all according to wikipedia).
Edit: The above is net income, so AFTER paying all the exorbitant salaries.
Apple alone makes enough money that it could fund pretty much all current publicly-funded science happening in the US at the current rate. That is a ridiculous amount of money, and publicly-funded science just cannot compete at that level.
(Currently on publicly-funded grants. Underpaid relative to what I could make elsewhere, but happy to be contributing to the greater good rather than helping some advertising company).
I realize this may be a pipe-dream but it feels like a better long-term strategy than "pay researchers more than FAANG".
[1] https://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/89407/How-much-salar...
Otherwise, you'll end up with potential Einsteins playing with spreadsheets in investment banks rather than discovering relativity, simply because they wanted a bit of disposable income.
Stupid, yes, but that's the situation we're in.
I recently realized that this void is because I am not living by my ideals/purpose. I know what I want to do in life, I know how I want to contribute to the story of humanity, and yet I am letting my greed overrule me and force me into a different path. Essentially, I am betraying myself, and this causes that feeling of unfulfillment/void.
I suspect I am not the only FAANG/unicorn/quant engineer that feels this way. Don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoy the day to day technical work I do. But my day job does not help me work towards what I have defined as my existential purpose.
Recently I decided I will change this, whether through volunteering or a new job (even if it might pay less.) I'm more excited than I have been in months. I will die happy if I can positively impact humanity towards the direction I hope for it to go towards.
"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind".
And even finding quality volunteering opportinities has been difficult. There's all kind of parasitic behaviour when free money or labor is on offer.
For whatever reason (personality, genes, whatever), I do not seem to be one who gets caught up in the envy of greener grass.
https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/grass-is-alway...
I've spent a large part of my life as a high end specialist, consulting, and thus, have had incredibly encompassing exposure to a huge variety of companies.
Whether non-profits, government departments, or corps, it's humans which cause the often ineffectual result, of our loving attempts to being order, and stability to our labourious output.
People are the same everywhere, and thus, so your endeavours will be.
The grass is not greener on the other side.
So what I would say is:
* if you strike out on your own, you can at least move on past things which bore you
* you need true financial independence to achieve this, to become a relaxed garage tinkerer of tech
* right now, we are at a moment of golden opportunity. The markets are down. This is where you buy in. The returns are buying in these times, not in time of feast.
So... maybe this is a good time to reassess. Invest. And plan to retire once you profit?
Then I got kicked out of my home and had to work back-breaking jobs, commute 2-4 hours either walking or biking, and at the end of the day barely earn enough money to make any progress (I was lucky that a family member let me sleep in their house, otherwise I would've been living paycheck to paycheck).
During that time I felt like my mind forced me to "withdraw inside myself," so my spirit wouldn't be completely broken. It had seemed that all of my thoughts, feelings, and emotions had been stripped away from me, and the only things left were those needed to "survive."
A little bit later I was lucky enough to get my first software job, making a very good salary, and lift myself out of poverty (and start "financially progressing"); but even though my life had been the best it ever was, I never regained the feelings that I lost.
I think what I lost was my naive worldview: one that was modeled by two decades worth of living upper middle class; where I survived by virtue of my birth, and not because I personally did anything -- detached from reality.
It was a very self-centered existence. I was only concerned about my own pleasure, and escaping from any displeasure ("fat FIRE" was an escape from the perceived displeasure of having to work, and not being able to partake in idle leisure). Other than this, I had no values, nor real "ideals" (but I did have an "ideal" life I wanted to build).
I think that's where my early "dreams" came from: a self-centered pursuit of personal gain and maximization of pleasure. I didn't really care about anything or anyone, nor was my existence driven by deeply-ingrained values that could serve as a bottomless well of direction and energy. I was simply living an animalistic life.
Being thrust into the "real world" destroyed all these notions; or rather, living in reality forced me to restrain myself: my emotions had no structure, and so I was fluttering about to wherever they took me. Having to "box" them in to do something useful and purposeful finally wrangled them in, and "molded" my personality to something other than "do the things I like, and get away from the things I don't like."
I would later have to rebuild my worldview and wrestle with the void in my soul that could no longer be filled with material distractions (a life-long process).
During this process, I realized putting financial considerations as my number one priority would not lead me to anywhere fulfilled (neither would idle retirement). The only thought that rang "true" at the time was that I needed to cultivate values, and those would dictate my purpose.
It's a never-ending process. And it always keeps me busy, but unlike focusing on material things, the fulfillment and sense of goodness I feel is not transient -- it lasts, and has built up through the years.
This is how I went from trying to live an ideal life, to one where I live by ideals.
Care to expand on this process of cultivating values, the wrestling with the void, where the sense of goodness comes from..
For the last 15 years I have worked on things that I felt needed doing. Others agreed. Even though our teams achieve something worthwhile it can often feel deeply frustrating. The challenges of financing something new, that doesn’t fit the box of how it is normally done, at some useful scale, is hard. I don’t want to do anything else, but sometimes it is very frustrating.
In the end, I think there is so much one can work on that really makes a difference in “the story of humanity” as you call it, that there really is no need to take a job that goes against ideals you may hold. Healthcare, energy systems, data for better governance, food tech, Ed tech, the list goes on. There will be something interesting to work on I am certain.
This is also covered in the Book of Eccliastes [1]. IMHO it's a good meditation on the issue regardless of one's views on Abrahamic religions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Your window to return to bonkers tech money is wide so you can afford to go away from it a while. But after you do, you probably won't want to return. That's fine! Just sock away enough that you don't feel you have to, otherwise it'll feel like reinserting yourself in the matrix and it SUCKS.
Anybody can compete, but apparently most of us choose not to. Who forces a young talent to settle for a job instead of taking the risk to innovate ? Maybe risk-taking for innovation is what could be the encouraged through taxation.
That's what some EU members think. Ask us how that's going :)
That's why most of the big and wealthy companies hare are around 100 years old or more, vs about 30 years old in the US.
Here in Austria you can get various government and EU grants for your startup and tax waivers on social security, and if by some miracle, you don't crash and burn like 95% of startups and manage to produce a semi-profitable company in the end, then you have to pay to the government retroactively all the social security contributions and taxes that have been previously waived over the past years, which is the final nail in the coffin for most companies here never growing or scaling beyond a couple of guys from uni in an apartment kind of company.
Therefore most of the innovation happens nearly exclusively within academia, as "outside" it's a pretty hostile tax environment that mostly favors those 100 year old companies that already have solid revenue streams.
But I don't think we are evolved enough to deal yet. We'd just end up in a communist prison life or something as people selfishly try to get more for themselves. Roddenberry thought an event like finding extraterrestrial life would be the push humans need, but I'm not so sure anymore.
but dont quote me.
its also a plot device to let them talk about economics.
I think that taxing large companies more than small ones might. The bedrock of capitalism is competition, and that is significantly stifled if big players with large amounts of capital can simply buy out anything innovative.
A better way to promote innovation might be through cultivating a spirit of entrepreneurship in young people, supporting startup accelerators, and handing out grants to promising candidates like the one in the article.
I thought it was an interesting story as I heard it repeated among the students at the tournament. Many of the teams have sponsors who donate $1000s so the schools/clubs can buy parts, etc. They are trying to encourage interest in STEM. But if the story is true, one company could spend $1000000 and inspire 1000s of students, generating lottery psychology. Of course, one person could just make up such a story for $0 and achieve the same thing. But it amuses me to think of some altruistic billionaire having a little fun and doing such a thing.
Taxing large corporations seems like it would be an excellent way in which to fund such grants.
Also, big companies are needed because there are technologies that cannot be produced by small companies. I do not understand recent tendency to make them look bad. Big companies are good for country and economy. Punishing companies for success is harmful for the progress.
I think letting market decide is better choice. Overregulation leads to decrease in competition and production.
Also, what is bad in it of big companies need to compete for talents? This competition leads for better opportunities and bigger salaries. I think it is good that person has a freedom of choice were to go.
Of course a lot of processes also scale with size. With a decent welfare system this greater efficiency could also be tapped to achieve widespread prosperity.
I don't see what makes cars more "democratic" or anti-trust as firmly on the "yeoman" side of things.
Not intrinsically, obviously, as anti-trust clearly shows. I am not anti-big intrinsically, for many of the reasons identified.
But I do think there are obvious downsides to be guarded against. If anything, as technology improves, technological barriers to entry should decrease and less big companies will be needed to work on certain advanced technologies.
The 2-20%. Especially those who are W2 employees and have limited options for offsetting their taxable income.
And we know they’ve engaged in anticompetitive behavior among themselves when it comes to recruiting. I would be unsurprised to find out it still takes place.
But I think the point was monopoly power from their core products is the real issue, and that enables the astronomical salaries.
The fact that they pay the highest prices for people means they sure suck at it.
If someone can run a profitable business when money is hard to come by as a non-public company, it makes sense for a public company to buy them because they can get money much more easily and expand the smaller company's operations and make an even bigger profit. They can even run the company poorly and still make money because their money is cheaper.
Essentially, it's an information and regulation problem.
The best thing yet invented, taxwise, to counteract this advantage that big businesses have in attracting money is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS)[1]. It' a great tax incentive program because it massively rewards people for investing in startups. It is highly targeted to encourage that and not be a general loophole.
[1]https://www.sba.gov/blog/qualified-small-business-stock-what...
Who knows what this person wants? He probably doesn’t either.
To put it on the talent's shoulder to decide against it ...? One can hope for individual cases but it is futile as Big Tech has fundamentally tilted the playing field not only on things like information flow but also on talent pool in their favor. From a system's POV at some point this of course gets stuck.
For example Musk tries to outpace this with his "rate of innovation" concept which on surface seems like a refreshing idea but is running on an outdated and collapsing hardware ("actual existing globalization") resulting in absurd numbers on the BBI like $243B. Leaving aside the forgone "sign-changing" and hefty "printing" by the central processors, initiated manually by a curious circle of people with access who decided it was a good idea.
yes i hope Zeloof (or someone else young, enthusiastic and social media adept like him) turns into the Marcin Jakubowski [1] or Dave Hakkens [2] of semi-conductors.
in this exciting still-early open source digital paradigm, a new type of leadership is required with a massive focus on horizontal knowledge production and transmission, a focus on a multitude of pedagogical styles, as well as a deep foundational belief in the abilities of our fellow humans (since it's easy and common to either believe we are 1) over-special or 2) dumb, as our schools are stuck in this reward/punishment paradigm which both 1) over-estimates a small number of students' skills because of advantages they gained outside of school (were you born with wealthy parents/community who had time and money to encourage/support you), or 2) which forces you into straightjacketed, (pedagogically) un-diverse, un-tailored learning journeys that make you take steps too quickly (a way to filter out as many working class people as possible except for a select few, by design)).
[1] Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEMkvT0DEk
[2] Precious Plastic Universe: a big bang for plastic recycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os7dREQ00l4
I feel like there hasn't been many of these recently. And the few that have been around get massive financing rounds that dilute options into nothing and never go ipo
This line of thought is absurd. We have no idea where this individual wants to work, and we're here tearing apart a hypothetical job choice.
And you do?
FAANG now is a means for saving for my next enterprise, which hopefully will happen very soon.
Also, where is my flying car?
In the same place where the majority of currently existing car drivers are potentially able to competently operate vehicles in the air.
I think while flying cars still have a technical component to the whole problem, the larger issues with flying cars aren't rooted in tech.
The US military alone I feel needs this sort of redundancy; not to mention the freedom we need from closed-source hardware.
Unfortunately, that's precisely what will happen.
A home-made lithographically-fabricated integrated circuit (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28263714 - Aug 2021 (13 comments)
DIY Silicon: Man Builds Integrated Circuit That's Similar to Intel's 4004 CPU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28208614 - Aug 2021 (6 comments)
Making 100 transistors silicon integrated circuit chips in your garage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28179241 - Aug 2021 (8 comments)
Second IC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28176255 - Aug 2021 (79 comments)
Homemade IC (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21239145 - Oct 2019 (40 comments)
Home Chip Fab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20657398 - Aug 2019 (131 comments)
First integrated circuit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18118559 - Oct 2018 (1 comment)
First IC :) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957545 - April 2018 (1 comment)
A home-made lithographically-fabricated integrated circuit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16955549 - April 2018 (116 comments)
First made-at-home integrated circuits using litography - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16953921 - April 2018 (1 comment)
These links are really helpful. Maybe I'll try making one someday.
> Maybe it’s overconfidence, but I have a mentality that another human figured it out, so I can too, even if maybe it takes me longer
Sometimes I explain what I do in software. "There is no magic. I don't like when there is magic. Some people do but it leaves me feeling unsure about what my code will do. Instead I tend to work very slowly at first, seeing what each little piece of code does and slowly seeing all the pieces work together. There's an important tool that I'm shocked to sometimes discover not all developers use - debugging. It's really just having the computer execute one line of code at a time and being able to see what the computer sees, and understand how things work at that level."
Lithography is a black box to me... but of course it doesn't have to be. So it's exciting to see someone invest time and assemble the physical tools to learn this dark art from the comfort of their garage.
I've had one of the worst educations, considering Egypt is at the bottom of the barrel for it's schooling system. So by the age of 25, I realize I haven't learned anything substantial.
I've managed to escape that somehow and now been working at high growth companies as a Deisnger and SW developer in SF.
Yet, because I'm basically self-taught and don't have good foundation in many topics such as Math, Compilers, and other important topics, I find myself extremely intimidated to approach such fields. For one, I realize I'll need to invest a lot of time to grasp them. Second, I get this feeling of anxiety that I'll never be able to get to the level I wish to be. Anxiety that can sometimes reach the level of a panic attack.
It sounds dramatic and maybe even pathetic to admit that about myself, but I'm still trying to figure out how to not get so worked up about that stuff when I'm learning and feeling hopelessly stuck to fully understand something.
Needless to say, I have a lot of work to do on myself.
Keep that up for 10 years and you're at thousands of hours of studying.
Plus all the experience on the job. That'll compound for sure.
As impressive and independent as this is, you have to wonder if any other gifted child could have done the same feat. The article seems to skip over this point, how many people know a "semiconductor engineer"?
However, most winners have had to deal with losing, so they know they should be humble about it.
Uh, I was just reminded of something - when I was a kid (5th grade) I was gifted a book of science experiments for kids. I was only able to do maybe 1 experiment in the book because I didn't have access to any materials needed for the experiments. Those books should come with a warning or something, cause I remember being like "what kid has access to this stuff? Where do you even buy this stuff?"
This isn't meant to be a "Woe is me" story, just trying to give some context.
The materials alone would’ve cost hundreds of dollars which was unfathomable to me in the early 90s.
He didn’t realize I came from a poor family; but I was too embarrassed to say anything.
Anyway he was disappointed when I came up with a very mediocre (but super cheap) project; he mentioned later he would have paid for materials.
Being poor is limiting in so many ways.
Please don't try to pick apart his accomplishments to make a point. He's still doing something that almost nobody with equivalent resources took the initiative to do.
I promise you that there are not millions of kids. Your argument may still hold, but the was majority of children knows no one with this level of technical experience, let alone any programmers.
> There are ten thousand semiconductor engineers kicking around Silicon Valley and Albuquerque and Portland, and another hundred thousand in Shenzhen and Taipei and Seoul. So conservatively ten million people know a semiconductor engineer.
Nobody says they were best friend with one. You know a lot of people, and those engineers know a lot of people. I don't know why you're doubling down on this.
Instead of focusing on the problem that only one person in a thousand knows a semiconductor engineer, we should figure out how to fix the much worse problem that out of the ten million people who do, only two people have made transistors in their basement, because that leak in the pipeline is apparently about five thousand times worse.
I'm 24 and a physics PhD student, and just afforded my first soldering iron. I lack the space, let alone the equipment to attempt anything close to this.
What a lucky, talented guy!
Living in the US comes with certain advantages like some of the lowest consumer prices in the West including HW equipment being dirt cheap on the second hand market plus houses being big enough for space for such hobbies along with the biggest take home pays yielding some of the highest purchasing power in the West, a formula tough to replicate anywhere else.
At least compared to where I live now in Europe, such hobbies would definitely be unaffordable for me monetary and real-estate wise, which is also a monetary issue at the end of the day.
I was looking on an interesting blog about buying certain older ThinkPads or older multi-core server chips for $50 used for building a cheap home lab, and when I checked, super exited, on my local second hand market, such machines or chips were fetching north of €250 and that was before the chip shortage broke the market. That's just one anecdote, but you get the point.
-They have some sort of windfall
-They have a trust fund or stipend that they receive just for existing
-Their parents pay for everything, or, alternatively, their parents pay for all of their living expenses so their own money is only "fun money."
-They, somehow, have a high paying job. In which case they probably won't be going to school full time also. Or they're "job" is having a lot of followers on social media.
This isn't a knock on anyone, I'm just trying to explain why one young adult student can be excited because they were finally able to save up for a soldering iron and another has a garage full of expensive experiment to tinker with.
It's pretty much implied this guy's living expenses (or most of them) are covered by his parents who also have tons of extra space and tolerance for him using it.
But it's laughable to think I could repair and run an electron microscope. Already mentioned, finding a broken microscope for £1k wouldn't happen here. And you're seriously underestimating the resource requirements to operate such a machine
For reference in us costs and spend your public stipend is less than my city spends per person on homeless folks and half of minimum wage. I think we’re taking different scales of money.
These kinds of projects are open to the top 5-10% of earners in the us so 15million or so folks could fund this but only 1-2 actually do it.
Not to detract from the achivement. But there's some respect to how the challenges were overcome by the large budget
A 22 year old in the top 5% of earns is a very lucky man
In the UK the second hand market is non-existent with the likes of the US. You can't just pick up hardware off Craiglist for next to nothing. It simply doesn't happen
Space is another thing as well. But I'm sure there's plenty of Americans whole live more urban without such space as well.
My future prospects may be promising, but owning a large garage to tinker in, whether electronics or something like woodworking seems like an untenable goal.
I grew up middle-class (my dad made, statistically, pretty much the median household income) and out of the scores of kids I knew, perhaps one of them might've had the parental and financial resources to do something like this, had he had the skill/intelligence/inclination.
We had a tiny garage, barely enough to fit a small car. Of course, there was no room for a car, because we needed to keep the yard tools and such in there.
I'm laughing -- trying to imagine my dad's reaction, had I asked him if I could build a science lab in there instead. "Sorry dad, the lawn mower's got to go somewhere else now" lol. He would have told me to go fuck myself.
But also, please understand that what he's accomplished here is monetarily out of the reach of your average American as well. Especially the average American teenager. The article notes that his dad is a very successful engineer, so roughly speaking he's almost certainly in the top 5-10%. Most homes do not have garages of this size and most garages are not climate controlled as this one is.
Additionally, his dad is an engineer. I grew up middle class, but my dad sold vegetables. Neither of my parents could do algebra, much less advanced stuff, so they weren't in a position financially or otherwise to help me start up a semiconductor fab in the garage. Not that I would have had the smarts or the drive to do that; I'm merely pointing out that this kid is at the intersection of talent and privilege.
In service of their "boy genius" narrative, the article glosses over how much parental monetary support this kid has had. To pick one example:
One of Zeloof’s best finds was a broken electron microscope
that cost $250,000 in the early ’90s; he bought it for $1,000
and repaired it.
I remember in the 90's, my school turned down a free electron microscope for exactly that reason -- the cost of the unit itself is only the tip of the iceberg.
The guy comes from an affluent family. The privilege is obvious from a mile away.
Still cool and all but in no way should anyone read this as a “oh, why wasn’t I able to do that” or “why aren’t more kids doing this?!” type of thing. It speaks to how out of touch most of HN is that they find this relatable.
The Wired article? Where does it say that? I only see reference to the skeptical engineer consulted by the father.
Suppose it would be possible while poor, and only his high IQ enabled him to do it. Then it would still be his luck for having parents with genes that produced high IQ in their kids. So it would still be "privilege".
What's more, his parents don't just happen to be all that, they presumably worked for it too, including looking for a suitable partner to have kids with.
It might even inspire the one or other person to try to earn more money to enable their kids to do great things that require a bit of money.
Or what is the reasoning behind privilege theory? If you go back in the ancestry of this guy, eventually you'll find some colonialist exploiting slaves, and if you go back in the ancestry of poor kids who don't create chips in their garage, eventually you'll find an exploited human who never had a chance to earn money?
Not even mentioning that creating chips in one's garage is not the only kind of achievement there is. And some poor kids do in fact succeed in life.
Steve Wozniak also was lucky to have a da who was a cutting edge engineer. So I guess that makes Wozniak owe all his money to society now, because he had such an unfair advantage.
I think you are, at a minimum, really missing out on some context?
My post was a direct response to a parent poster who mused about how this sort of thing is possible in America, whereas it's nearly impossible for most Europeans. I responded by pointing out that this sort of thing also isn't possible for most Americans.
Or what is the reasoning behind privilege theory?
This kid seems super talented, and I'm glad that he seems to have parents with the inclination and means to support this sort of thing.
Some niches are decent value
Finding a £1k electron microscope would never happen
Edit:
A quick search across Europen eBay, I could buy a used/broken SEM for £5000 ($6850)
Then I'd need to rent somewhere to operate it
However, there is no doubt the feat pulled off here is impressive and insanely difficult to do. I most likely couldn't replicate it, but I wouldn't be able to find that out.
That's like 10 bucks on amazon? Skip 2 meals, or panhandle for 4 hours. Done - soldering iron.
I had forgotten the pathetic level of funding science PhDs get in Britain. £12k is possibly on the low end, but a PhD with this funding was on the fourth page of the main site listing them [1].
Minimum wage assuming a 40-hour working week is £19,760 per year, and after taxes works out to £17,100. In other words, they are probably already skipping meals.
For comparison, a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen is paid £47,500 per annum [2], or £31,000 after tax (probably more, I think there's a tax discount for foreign researchers).
[1] https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CMM286/phd-studentship-achieve-ne...
[2] https://uniavisen.dk/en/salaries-of-university-of-copenhagen...
I used to be a junior software developer (hence username) earning £40k - far above median income.
Post tax, rent, bills I could save over the year to purchase the £5k electron microscope I mentioned quite easily.
But then I'd need to rent space for it. And purchase the rest of the equipment.
My points aren't some "look how bad I have it" gotcha. It's highlighting the perspective that this student is lucky to be supported with the resources to excel in his passion. Even if his use case is quite exceptional
Others have highlighted for Americans this probably represents a family in the top 5-10% of earners. A realm which American software developers can fall into
For myself, the chance to work in a lab of equipment costing the order of six figures required a career change and significant pay cut. But that's just me
To clarify. I am mind blown he has pulled this off. It's an extraordinary feat. All I can be is envious of his skills and privilege
A homeowner who earns middle class wages would have the space for a home lab/shop (without renting additional space) and would be able to pay a couple thousand dollars for their son's hobby. The stereotypical middle-class soccer mom spends more than that a year on her kid's activities. This is representative of at least the top 50% of American earners, not just the top 5-10%. This kid's father is the owner of a small sheet metal fabrication shop and he probably does decently well for himself but most of his wealth is likely the value of his business.
On posts advocating for density on HN, I often see people wondering why Americans resist densification because the benefits of a walkable city are so immense. Stuff like this and your belief that having a home electronics fabrication shop is out of reach for all but the rich (and the fact that most Americans can already do nearly any errand with less than 15 minutes of travel) are some of the reasons why. It is not that unusual for a middle class homeowner to have a home shop, though normally the equipment in them is something like a table saw or a mid-20th century manual milling machine, not a homebuilt photolithography machine and an old refurbished SEM. People who have them either use their garages (either an extra bay if they have a two/three car garage and only one/two cars or they use the entire garage and park their cars in the driveway or on the street) or they use a shed placed in their yard. Ever wondered where the stories of people starting companies in their garages come from?
To a middle-class American not living in a super high cost of living area this kid's story is something that they could have done had they had parents who trusted them and if they had the motivation and inclination to do it. The people complaining about that this kid being "privileged" are ignorant of how much of America lives and/or are jealous that they weren't able to do what he did when they were younger.
You really don't realize just how low the median income in the USA is. It's $45k for the median full-time employed individual¹, compared to $39k (£29k) for the UK². You can put the figure in pounds into https://listentotaxman.com/ if you'd like to go further with this, and think of taxes, healthcare etc.
I think your argument still holds, but only for part of the middle class or above. (There's an income distribution table on the Wiki page.)
> …walkable city…
Very few people advocate for only dense, apartment-style housing. They are actually advocating for the choice, to be allowed to build something that isn't a large house with space all around it. This is forbidden by zoning rules in much of the USA.
In a European city, and I'll pick Copenhagen since I live here and it's often cited as one of the best in these arguments, you find apartments of various sizes in the city centre (plus a very few extremely old, extremely expensive houses). As you travel away from the centre, there's a mixture of apartment blocks, smaller apartment buildings (perhaps three apartments in a 3 floor building), denser single-family homes (e.g. shared walls with one or both neighbours), and homes with grass all around. The further you travel, the more the balance shifts to the end of that list -- though if you pass a railway station, you'll find some more apartment buildings. Shops are also distributed throughout, though they are usually nearer to the apartment buildings / stations for obvious reasons.
On [3], the part between the rough circle of water made by the rectangular lakes in the north west and the old zig-zag water fortifications in the south east is considered the city centre. You'll see the type of housing change if you zoom in, then move north, northwest or west. (South, you'll not get the same effect as you'll run into the airport or a nature reserve.) You can also search "Supermarket".
I have a colleague with a couple of children, a decent garden, a car, and a basement containing a metalworking workshop. He's still within 10 minutes walk of a supermarket, and it would be safe for a child to walk there alone.
A friend needed more space than that for her hobby, so she lives on the edge of the city. She has a huge garden (which is the hobby, part is growing food), but she also has a 20 minute walk to the station if she wants to go somewhere without driving, i.e. before and after drinking. (Or < 10 minutes on a bicycle, I assume.)
Conversely, I live in the city centre. A colleague with two children lives fairly close by, in an apartment. Our hobbies don't need lots of space, so we've never felt the need to move further out. The adults and children don't have plenty of space for big hobbies, but it's a more convenient location for other things, like cultural activities, restaurants, people living nearby.
One example of that: a friend's teenage son likes LARP. At 13/14 he obviously can't drive, but he can walk a few minutes to the station. That takes him to the shop selling foam swords and whatever in the city centre, and the locations in/around Copenhagen where LARP groups meet, mostly in the larger woods.
(And can we say man, rather than kid? He's 22.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_... (First paragraph, $865*52).
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1002964/average-full-tim... (2017 figure to be comparable)
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6841742,12.5866976,4173m/dat...
The typical American does not see *any* benefit to giving up their car and house. Every single benefit like < 10 minute travel time is already a reality (because what matters is how long it takes to run an errand, not how it is run), but they'd have to live in a smaller house. They are a short drive already from all the activities they could ever want and are friends with all of their neighbors. Their kids can play in the street safely as there might be a dozen cars a day traveling down their street, most of which belong to people who live there. There is no need to though, because everyone has a yard to play in. You admitted that most of your friends could not set up a shop if they wanted to, and the ones who do have them live on the outskirts of the city and have to add 20 minutes to every trip (unless they drive). For the typical middle class American, increasing density offers *no* benefit as literally everything you describe is either something they already have or something irrelevant, but it has significant downsides.
If all you talk to are internet urbanists and tech people living in the Bay Area, you are *not* getting an accurate picture of how the average American lives. This is why urban activists (and Europeans who have pride for their hometowns) are constantly bewildered as to why anyone resists them and think it's because people just don't understand the benefits or are brainwashed by car companies, not that they've heard your arguments before or visited your ideal areas and decided that they just don't want to live in an area like that. Urban activist types tend not to be the type of person who would have a home shop in the first place or have any hobbies that require space and they have fewer (if any) children. They are a vocal minority in the US: only 19% of Americans want to live in a dense urban area [4].
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Median_equivalen...
[3] https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-health-insurance-...
[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america...
So I used the numbers for a full-time employee, and I believe they are both correct. [1] if you prefer a government source, £611 × 52 = around $43k (increase presumably due to this being 4 years later).
Your British number is for all households, including those where one or both adults doesn't work. However, they are comparable.
On urbanism, you've completely missed my point. Americans are forbidden from living like Europeans by their state and local governments [2], and I consider this completely unreasonable.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
It is not illegal to build in a European style in most of the country; we have entire areas built in a similar style. Zoning is also not a fixed thing in the US; it is very common for zoning rules to change as the area grows. Most of the country is not the San Francisco Bay Area. Contrary to popular online belief, only 19% of Americans want to live in dense cities, so our cities actually mostly match people's preferences. Zoning and land use rules make it illegal to build American style cities in much of Europe as well, so far all you know, most Europeans would like American-style living they were allowed to have it. Here's a ridiculous example of some of your continent's NIMBYs not allowing a rural landowner to open a small restaurant [1]; the same sort of people are also opposed to building any form of suburban housing.
The article says the microscope was $1k. That's about 750 GBP. The kid didn't make the purchase at the market rate when he just happpened to feel like it. He jumped at the right point when an opportunity presented itself. Everyone immersed in some hobby dealing with old equipment comes across such opportunities now and then.
Sam's lab looks like it cost somewhere north of $10k, but south of $50k. But I mean that's like from empty garage with nary a multimeter to your name.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJXio_jpc_Y
He doesn't mention costs directly, but this video covers the facts that they had to do some additional plumbing work, additional electrical work, there's a big-ass voltage transformer he had to acquire, etc.
I also wonder how much the shipping costs were on that machine. Unless they were able to pick it up locally with a rented van, shipping alone might have exceeded the cost of the unit. Shipping pallets of fragile gear with specialized handling constraints is not cheap.
My high school turned down a free electron microscope (a college was getting rid of it, I think) for reasons such as this. Even if you can get the microscope for free there are other costs, space requirements, etc.
Wordcloud - https://imgur.com/zeagyNf
Note that I wrote this comment, because I just don't like blind positivity. Money is really a problem. There were people who talked about home-made chips for a long time, but the no.1 issue had always been money. Optics and lithography is nothing new, and it just takes a lot of time, effort, and tons of money (+ opportunity cost) to find the right recipe that is reproducible.
Welp, welcome to the internet.
Intel builds 2020's-era chips with ~$20B capital in Ohio.
Take the arithmetic mean of 1970 and 2020, and take the geometric mean of 1M and 20B. This very rough back-of-the-envelope calculation implies a small-ish company could build 1995-era chips with ~$141m capital.
It seems to me that $141m is a quite reasonable "insurance policy" price major automakers would be willing to pay to ensure a stable supply of microcontrollers with 1995-era specs, given that they were recently in a situation of being unable to sell a bunch of $35,000 trucks because they couldn't find a batch of $3.50 microcontrollers.
And this story repeats across a lot of different industries.
Why aren't people throwing money at quickly building cheap chip plants to churn out low-spec chips?
While everyone says we just need to assume that privacy is dead, that we can never truly know or trust our hardware, I disagree. This shows it's possible - not all that practical, but possible, and practical can come later - to make computer systems ourselves.
It's not that unfathomable to make a 100,000 gate device with the progression of what he's doing, and that's all it'd take to make a real, proper m68k processor capable of running a modern OS and any modern software with 100% verifiable source.
The registration headaches must be considerable, he needs to re-place the die in exactly the same spot for every pass of exposure.
Some chips are not easy to get and I bet vintage computing fans would pay enough so that a business in that area could be profitable.
IANAL but
The patent, how you’d typically protect the chips, have long expired.
But the chip could have been protected as a work of art under copyright.
However that would cover only a very similar layout of the transistors. Functionally identical chips wouldn't be covered even if they weren’t re-created from scratch.
Didnt Nintendo do something similar with the MOS6502?
Either way, change the lithography keeping the chip electrically the same and you’re good to go
That being said, many chips also contain code (e.g. firmware, microcode) that is potentially eligible for copyright independently of the chip layout.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_layout_desi...
It’s how IBM PC clones were legitimate back in the 1980s; and how AMD managed to stay on the legal side when taking on Intel.
The upside, compared to things like Europractice or MOSIS being lower one-time costs and lower turnaround time, but higher per-chip costs, which matches very well with the "hobbyist" target.
I long thought that this would be a nice niche market, but I never found any clue about whether these are realistic numbers or if anyone else would be interested in that.
what (prior) breakthroughs enabled Zeloof to achieve this?
my question was more: what is the short laundry list of the exact developments/research that allowed Zeloof's garage-size/at-home chip-making?
Further, capital costs will rapidly start rising as well as the required knowhow as the feature size shrinks, so I think he's already quite close to the limit a one person hobby project can achieve.
All this being said, this is an extremely impressive achievement. There's a long way from reading how stuff is supposed to work, to actually doing it your garage. My hat's off to Mr. Zeloof.
Or maybe the retro chip synthesizer crowd would buy a product, but again...how many?
Now for hardened applications, these large nodes have their uses. But that's a very niche case.
The analog desinger that wants a few hundred copies of a circuit using matched transistors.
Ferrari willing to spend 10K a piece for a silly automotive chip
I can see a market for very flexible small scale fabs
The security paranoid who want a simple CPU they can trust at an optical scale they can verify (ie imageable to compare with what they ordered)
There doesn't seem anything more toxic than what you would find in your run-of-the-mill chemical research lab. One time I got to handle a few liters of trimethylsilylcyanide (at work, not in my garage lol), that was an exciting day in the lab.
This is but one example of articles I've read talking about how "toxic" chip fab is...and I'm like, have you seen the coal industry?
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/reevaluating-the-toxic...
> Aside from being caustic, many commonly-used chemicals are known human carcinogens. Some examples that can carry high risk are toluene, acetone, methylene chloride (DCM), xylene, chloroform, and isopropyl alcohol.
You mean paint stripper? Granted, DCM is being phased out, but I've worked with gallons of the stuff. Xylene/toluene are in spray paint. Acetone and isopropanol are literally under my bathroom sink. Acetone is straight-up not a carcinogen, and IPA is carcinogenic in the same way bacon and beer are carcinogenic. Like, technically yes, but it's not exactly methyl iodide.
> Others—like glycol ethers—may even cause reproductive harm.
You mean windex? Contains ethyl/butyl glycol ether (cellosolve).
Sure later in the article they mention mercury, cadmium, tellurium, those are pretty yucky. But how many NiCd batteries do consumers improperly dispose of every day?
Chip fab is probably no worse than your average autobody garage/paint shop combined with a metal plating facility. Yeah don't go dumping your effluents in landfills or storm drains, but we already have protocols and pipelines for chemical hygiene and waste management.
Chip fab actually has the advantage of tons of money to throw at proper chemical hygiene, unlike fossil fuel industry with razor thin margins.
Can we do something about the mining, fracking, and coal burning industries though?
unpaywalled Wired story: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%...
Whatever it is, it must require careful handling. And that in his parents’ garage.
http://sam.zeloof.xyz/sio2-patterning/
See my other threads. HF is Serious Business, but approachable for the hobbyist if you know about chemical hygiene. You can buy Whink at the hardware store.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Superfund_sites_in_Ca...
These are just the semiconductor manufacturer names I recognize offhand. Many more companies on the full list:
Advanced Micro Devices
Fairchild Semiconductor
Hewlett-Packard
Intel
Intersil
Monolithic Memories
National Semiconductor
Synertek >>> Zeloof is working on the Z3, a chip that will be capable of adding 1 + 1, as a step to a full microprocessor.Does the article say what he does with HF? Ive often thought home brew chip making at 70s scale would just be a lot of elbow grease, but definitely doable. Safety is not that hard. Chemicals not that bad. Nothing that American garage tinkerers haven't dealt with before (my favorite, tin can turbine)
Except for the HF. Ill admit I dont know much about HF, I used it only once in a lab (making BJTs) but: HF is nasty dangerous, impossible (?) to get without a license, impossible to dispose properly.
Is there an alternative to etch SiO2 or is this guy on the edge of legal and insane?
AFAIK the chip industry uses flourides too (buffered oxide etch) because unbuffered HF has a too unpredictable etch rate.
There's a line between "demands respect and thought during handling" and "reckless/insane". Having a properly ventilated workspace, and knowing how to handle dangerous chemicals, I would say HF is dangerous but not insane. Borderline insane for a hobbyist would be things like generating primary explosives/peroxides or toxic gases: cyanides, phosphines, hydrogen sulfide, ketene. I worked as a lab chemist for years and even with a decent home lab, I would be loathe to do any experiments which generates toxic gases in anything greater than 100's of mg quantity, because discharging your vent hood becomes a big concern. I've heard stories where someone accidentally acidified some cyanide (in a hood) and it killed a bunch of pigeons on the roof.
HF, eh, that's fume hood and PPE territory. Neutralize with calcium hydroxide, evaporate it in a hood to salt, and dispose as you would other solid chemical waste. It's just fluorite mineral at that point.
Yeah, sure thing.
"LOL, sorry dad!" says the genius but now single-handed kid.