Hacker News Reader

xw3098on 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

You might try starting here then. It’s a good community as well

https://www.tinytapeout.com/

You’re not required to buy the tile to take the lessons

xw3098on 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

For very basic cmos nodes 24 turn is possible. But for most advanced node the lead time is months because that’s the minimum manufacturing time.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/three-month...

xw3098on 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

You can have this now https://efabless.com/

xw3098on 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

Price is relative. That could be Los Altos, California. Which is very nice, walkable with garages, great parks and outdoors, but not what most people would call affordable. :)

xw3098on 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

You should read this shorty story:

https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

xw3098on 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2020/06/09/xilinx-laun...

Xilinx launches ‘industry’s first’ 20 nanometer space-grade FPGA chip

xw3098on 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

We don’t know what node they’re targeting so this is all speculation but if it’s anything below say 22nm then that’s finFET, and there’s nothing low cost about finFET at prototype volumes.

If it’s not finFET then a non production mask set is much less than $50 million in 2023.

Also, keep in mind maskless lithography has been used commercially for roughly ten years now. And it’s been in Universities for significantly longer.

xw3098on 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

Process development is closer to chemical engineering and that’s not bad when compared with their salary.

xw3098on 22-year-old builds chips in his parents' garage (2022)

There’s no way it’s lower cost. However what it could be is guaranteed line capacity and delivery dates. And if you’re doing small orders from a large foundry you don’t get that. Those things have value too and someone might be willing to pay a bit extra to get them.

My main issue is semiconductor lines are fragile beasts that need constant tinkering. So if the system requires full time staff to keep running, that’s going to be really expensive.

xw3098on Libre Silicon – Free semiconductors for everyone

"by charging around 2'000 USD per prototype and letting an engineer wait for months"

Is the $2000/prototype really the thing that's keeping the market closed. If we assume it takes one engineer one year to spec/design/test one IC, compared to $2K, it's still going to be that engineer's salary that dominates the cost of the project. Even at non US rates.

The thing that's keeping IC design closed is IC design is really hard and tool chain installs are very specific to a particular design. Even if I gave you my design files. It's unlikely you could turn that into an ASIC as is. I'm not saying the tools have to work this way, I'm just saying that today, they do. Even if you're doing a digital design of an ASIC. The verilog is just one piece of what you need.

xw3098on Iowa man files lawsuit after being arrested twice for criticizing the police

Do you have a source for that? It seems like a problematic measure to use absolute dollars spent as it had to be normalized per capita and to cost of living.

In just officers per capita the US more or less middle of the pack.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...

xw3098on Can we build trustable hardware? (2019)

Assume this was true. Now, for the sake of argument, say someone makes a mask with an error. How would you identify where in the manufacturing system the fault lies?

xw3098on Can we build trustable hardware? (2019)

Researchers are working on solutions for the rest of us. Here’s one concept

https://wiki.f-si.org/images/5/5c/Gabriel_Gouvine_MOOSIC_FSi...

xw3098on Can we build trustable hardware? (2019)

In many Universities one can still have their design manufactured. For example:

https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?view=catalog&filt...

That’s just the one I’m familiar with. I know there are others.

Mostly they use MPWs now though so one can’t visit the site. But the price is pretty low. One can get ~100 qty 10 mm^2 packaged parts for maybe $20K

xw3098on PC shipments decline slows in Q3 2023, but Apple plunges over 23%

> The iPhone 15 to me categorically proves m3 will be a pretty incremental improvement

Unless you care about Mac GPU performance.

"Overall, Apple's claim of up to 20% better performance seems to be right on the money, as is normally the case with these things."

https://www.imore.com/iphone/iphone-15/the-iphone-15-pros-a1...

xw3098on Photographer showcases the power of iPhone 15 pro max

You're not wrong but on the other hand, if the knife can't cut, that will hamper the chef.

Also Wu had this to say, “The iPhone 15 Pro is the best camera available for its size, and while it can’t replace bigger dedicated systems, it can create images which still push my own artistic vision and display them at gallery quality and sizes, and I was shocked how good the prints were.”

Pretty decent endorsement really.

xw3098on Nearly half a billion small tech items thrown away

The top 5 accounted for ~70% of the items.

260 million disposable vapes

30 million LED, solar and decorative lights

26 million cables

10 million USB sticks

7 million cordless headphones

Maybe USB-C helps with the cables, I’m guessing many of those are failed cables though. In any case, I don’t think it will address disposable vapes or decorative lights.

Anyway, I dispute the 95% of gadgets number. I don’t think we can be too surprised disposable vapes ended up in the trash.

xw3098on San Francisco is becoming a tech hub again, Y Combinator CEO says

If you think San Francisco is bad now. You should’ve seen it in the 70s, when I was a kid. The crime was so bad it made the second sentence in the Wikipedia page. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_in_the_1970s

Honestly these things come and go, as they do in all big cities. Adapting to change, especially for large groups of people, is alway rough and tumble. I’m sure they’ll get it figured out eventually. Just in time for it to change again…

Also, most residents as Chicago disagree with your assessment of their housing affordability.

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/crains-forum-affordable-hous...

xw3098on Thousands of young people are fleeing Toronto – economists say city will suffer

That was a thing during Japan’s real estate bubble in the 80s but I doubt any banks still offer that.

xw3098on Graph Mining Library

It would be nice to have a bit of documentation on what makes this library special as well. It’s a significant time investment to learn a library like this one well. So some information on why one should choose this over, say, http://snap.stanford.edu/ Would be very helpful.