@user-vo9rv9ju9l 50 fold?? Ah ah, good joke. You're pregnant with hype. And you can start by watching Asianometry's videos on semiconductors so you can grasp a glance at the abstraction of how things work and the epic challenges lying ahead. Good luck understanding just the basics.
People tell me similar things when they see me just building a plant monitoring and irrigation system with custom software or model and 3D print usable equipment but this guy is just amazing. I love the setup. Super impressed :D
the fact that you are taking on something so daunting and locked behind so many industry secrets, and are still able to actually make working chips is mind blowing and totally inspiring.
I think my last comment didn't make it? Anyway, just want to share, for anyone interested in doing something like this I can't post the link, but search an article by the name: A maskless photolithographic prototyping system using a low-cost consumer projector and a microscope by Musgraves, Close, and Tanenbaum It's a write up on the exact system as in this video
"I made this while I was l like a junior in high school." From the early days, watching your videos, I think about how awesome your parents must be. In "The Boy who Played with Fusion" there's a section considering unusually curious and ambitious children, contrasting protective vs. trusting parenting styles. For reflection, the world is a better place because you had what you needed.
I have a copy of that book. You are right. Sam Zeloof is of that class of person. I personally think just from this one video he's unusually gifted, if not a genius. And this kind of machine he has cobbled together from off the shelf parts is what I call creative genius. He's also open about his early prototypes, showing that it takes ongoing effort to evolve the design to what he is showing in the video. That's very generous of him so that the rest of us can see and be encouraged by his work. Bravo Sam Zeloof! You're just awesome. I'm subscribed.
I was desperate to do stuff like this as a kid, but my parents basically banned me from using any tools because they wanted me to go to school for dentistry or something… So I started using IV drugs instead. Just as exciting although a bit worse for your health. it was the frustration of not being able to work with my hands and needing to find a creative outlet. Soon as I turned 20 I got clean, haven’t touched the stuff for 15 years and started multiple businesses doing technology and craftsmanship related things. Parents.... let your kids do the shit they want to do, even if it’s crazy science stuff.
@@hullinstruments Thank you for sharing your story. Anyone who can pick themselves back up and carry on to better places is inspirational. Wishing you the best of success in all that you do.
Kudos for you! I was flabergasted when I viewed your video. Flabergasted but also with a big smile. I work 30 years for ASML as a project manager / unit manager in the mechanical engineering / mechatronics scope. I have seen a lot, but saw no one with a stepper in his shed. Interesting part is that ASML also started in a shed. Their first stepper was maybe even less sophisticated as yours. Once again kudos and hope you will stay in the high tech inidustry, I think you are gold.
Thanks for commenting on this and getting the algorithm to suggest it to me. I'm interested in exploring photolithography and your videos have been very informative.
Okay, I don't say this to a lot of people, but you are actually amazing. It's hard to even fathom one person doing this himself, that which had taken multiple people so many years to even figure out. Cheers, man. This is just incredible.
I was wanting for more, thank you so much... How about creating a NAND gate and show the entire process? Starting with the design in paper and going to the fabrication and finally the test... YAY!
Sam, You are truly an inspirational young man. I have been in the semiconductor industry for over 40 years working with customers on designs of products using various electronics and all the various technical, project and logistical activities required to get an end product to market. Watching your video was mind blowing to me. When I was young, a crystal radio was one of my earliest projects as an elementary school age kid as I was drawn towards tech in my time. Your project makes my earliest experimentation look like cave man tech. Keep it up. I definitely will view more of your videos and look forward to seeing where you end up in your career. Awesome work and you opened my eyes to something I had never considered someone tackling at home. Made my day!
Seeing your ingenuity is very inspiring! This is something completely outside of my wheel house, but it's still fun to see something so complex be boiled down to it's fundamental pieces.
For low scale production is not very complex. In fact threre are opensource projects to be able to build very high resolution chips at "home" and cheap.
I spent 80% of the video yelling "Yes! Yes! That's perfect!" at the screen. I have done something similar except used a pulsed laser instead of the regular lamp that came with the projector while trying to make a laser based cell printer. I hadn't been able to get it to focus close up. I tried to use a machinist's lope but, meh, didn't really work. I had never even considered that all I had to do was flip the lens around! Clever as all heck! My goodness your channel is underrated.
@@andreasv9472 yep a pulsed NdYAG laser that was in a hair removal laser straight off of ebay. Lining everything up was quite tricky. I had to keep the lamp and fan connected and going or else it refused to power on. Keeping everything out of the beam line required more duct tape than I would like to admit and I had to defocus the beam with a lens to be extra cautious about accidentally vaporizing the micromirrors (The laser can pack a mantis shrimp sized punch). Unfortunately I've been too busy with other projects to finish this one but I will soon. It was still able to form an image but it would occasionally break-down the air and (I suspect) form an opaque plasma which blocked out the center of the image. I had thought I had fried the mirrors but it was just a ball of plasma in the way and it didn't have any problems on the next shot!
@@andreasv9472 Tragically there is a reason. I am trying to print cells with laser assisted forward transfer which in less jargony english means: shoot the laser at some mylar and plasmize a bit of the surface of it so it (and whatever is on it) gets pushed forward. The reason I can't use a regular laser is twofold: 1. not powerful enough to vaporize anything unless it's quite a few watts and very well focused to a point (and I need not a point but a plane of high energy light). 2. yet somehow too powerful, oddly enough while the peak power of the pulsed laser is youj (huge) the average power is less than a regular continuous one! If I pointed the continuous one at the mylar film it would burn through in a half of a second, whereas even though the pulsed one can vaporize the metal part of the mylar it leaves the clear plastic part intact (which is kind of crazy). As far as I know no one has ever even made a continuous laser that can break down air so while that would solve that problem, it's not that bad of a problem and it's a problem that's caused by me being too cheap to buy a concave lens to spread out the laser and instead using a convex one and letting the light go through the focus and then expand out from there. I guess it wasn't such a tragic thing after all. Thanks for asking by the way, I'll post here when I get it working.
I love you man! Please don't tell it to my wife! Do you understand the level of science you perform? I am trying to read semiconductor physics and still losing hair day by day. Respect man, respect.
It doesn't have to be anything incredible. We have to get to a point where every hobbyist has the opportunity to create their own high quality and resolution chips in their lab, economically. th-cam.com/video/McEK-sz-Y8c/w-d-xo.html In fact, there are many ways to make your chips economically, if we are talking about small scale. Some of these are also explained in the videos of this channel.
This is so great! I cannot even get up to bake some pancakes - and you're baking your own microchips, in home-lab, with self-built and modified equipment! Amazing!
I studied Printmaking in college and I am continued to be surprised how those processies and techniques overlap with electronics (etching copper, sdm stencils, pcb photo masking, using lead, and now this photolithography process). I find the connection pretty neat. Very interesting video, way above my skills and expertise though haha!
I just discovered your channel and wow. It kind of saddened me ngl. I saw myself doing great things once, but life caught up. I wish I could elaborate, but man... and we're probably age mates. I just went from purely lucky to very unlucky. My academic advisor once told me you manufactur your own luck... I've spent a long time meditating on that. Let's just hope I can begin pick myself back up.
Sam, been a fan since your first few videos, and I find myself returning to them all the time. We're on the cusp of an open source ASIC revolution with Skywater and other players, and your work is really timely and appreciated, even if it just shows how accessible this could be in theory. I don't know if you've ever seen the "Build Your Own Metal Workshop" series by Dave Gingery, recently I've been unable to shake the idea of what it would take to make something like that but for DIY silicon/electronics, as impractical as that might be. I found a paper about using "Bluray optical head for low cost laser lithography", available with those search terms, and other similar experiments with off the shelf 405nm laser systems, a process that I'm sure you've come across before. I was wondering if you had tried something like that? I can't imagine the years and effort it took to get down to the metal as much as you have, but I've been trying to find cheap, accessible ways to try this stuff with an eye at some sort of measurable success with low cost components and I thought that might be a good place to start too if you could build kits around cheap components capable of nano scale adjustment by design.
This is a great achievement. I did a bit of reading when DLPs first became available and the consumer devices were generally sensitive to UV light. I am not sure what the vulnerable component was but UV rated DLPs were special order. How hard would it be to make logic onto a solar cell wafer. If you could have a solar powered temperature transmitter all on one die you could sprinkle them from a plane and monitor thousands of ground temperatures with a flyover.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt I am not happy about wasting energy. However sometimes th cost of getting energy to a remote location is more than the value in having the energy there unless you can eliminate the power line or the transport of liquid fuel by collecting sunshine using a energy intensive solar cell. My proposal above was for a specific application that cannot be powered any other way so the complaint is not relevant. Having a distributed generation grid will make it less vulnerable if that is desired (does not serve the people control agenda though) because it has to carry less current from a central generator. Using silicon cells for grid scale generation is probably not a viable idea yet. Perhaps eventually. Somewhere in the future of humanity we are fossil free, I believe we should investigate all options while we still have some fossil reserves and see which one is the viable one. Subsidies should be used with great caution but there should be total freedom to try any crazy idea.
@ actually now I do wonder how silicon is purified. Crystal grow is a technology to purify it. Maybe starting with clean sand and then some weird chemistry is good enough for solar cells.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt To make semiconductors that work well monocrystalline silicone is required. This is the blue solar cells. The cheaper and less efficient ones are the pink polycrystalline solar cells that generate enough power for a calculator. Silicone was traditionally purified by zone crystallisation. A few passes provides very pure silicone. The silicone is made by reducing silicone dioxide (sand) in some way. Possibly through an intermediary compound. Crude silicone can be made at home using a thermite reaction, saw a YT video recently on that topic.
Awesome as always! I can imagine that some day there will be some kind of fully integrated solution for semiconductor/microchip fabrication, something a bit like a 3d printer. Maybe I'll make it work someday.
Really? I can’t. 3D printers are already rather niche despite being very useful for prototyping or cheap one-off parts. Such self-contained fab is pointless, because you already have FPGAs, which: 1. Are relatively cheap and capable (ignore the ongoing chip shortage) 2. Faster to prototype on (even moderate designs take little time to synthesize and flash) For large volumes it will naturally be cheaper to pay a proper manufacturer. The resulting niche where small-scale, slower than SOA, house-made, expensive chips are reasonable would likely amount to, like, 4 people in the world. This doesn’t fare well for your idea. Such videos make it look like chip design and manufacturing is a lot easier than it is. The process itself is straightforward, but debugging any issues is absolutely unreal. It’s really, really, *really* hard for nontrivial designs.
Hello Sam, I am wanting to create silicon wafers, Do you mind me asking, What projector are you using? You said in your TH-cam video that it was from Amazon, but I don’t want to buy one that will not be able to be modified. Thanks in advance. (This is a copy of the question I sent on your website)
Awesome stuff as always my man, I love your videos. They're super helpful! I'm thinking I'll finally jump down the rabbit hole on a new project this month and I wouldn't have a clue where to start if it wasn't for the wealth of knowledge on your site. Thanks!
@@SamZeloof, in this current chip crisis we’re in with cars, it would be interesting to see if some Americans (not wealthy individuals) could step up to the plate to start making some needed units. Also, I feel certain there are special ones made that are covered by patents.
I've been watching your videos for a long time (years) and the day I get some time to get back to nerd-learn mode I'm totally going to assemble a setup like this. Props to you: you do excellent work.
This system reminds me of pulling air bubbles through a piece of taffy. No matter how small they're pulled together, the light beams don't overlap one another. You can pull it down as thin as you want and still see the distinct beams. Fucking A+, man!
Great video! I've been waiting for a video that gives a fairly complete overview of your process. This is my favourite video of your let, I love the simple approach!
I was desperate to do stuff like this as a kid, but my parents basically banned me from using any tools because they wanted me to go to school for dentistry or something… So I started using IV drugs instead. Just as exciting although a bit worse for your health. it was the frustration of not being able to work with my hands and needing to find a creative outlet. Soon as I turned 20 I got clean, haven’t touched the stuff for 15 years and started multiple businesses doing technology and craftsmanship related things. Parents.... let your kids do the shit they want to do, even if it’s crazy science stuff.
This is so cool, I wonder though, how do you align the pattern between different steps? Also, have you considered designing a version of this to sell commercially? Even making it for 10's of thousands of dollars would be a massive discount from competitors.
Hello Sam. I'm working on my own system based in your invaluable information. Thanks thanks and thanks. Please... Can you provide any references about the fine adjustment optics (8:25)?? I don't know what I need.
Fine setup *to explore* the technology. I wonder though why the beamer and the microscope are left intact if it requires permanent modification - wouldn't it have been easier to deconstruct everything and to reconstruct a crude, but compact 'lithography machine' in which You can account for every parameter, because You have set up the entire chain of light source and quality lenses ? I wonder also whether You had come across a 'benefit-effort-ratio' threshold of diminishing returns where smaller circuits may be more efficient, but requiring so much investment in comparison to... let's say some form of mere parallel computing with much larger chips ? I don't fully understand the physics, yet - that's just what comes to mind when watching it.
I have to ask, and maybe you cover this in the video: roughly, what's the process node you're working with at this point? Is it 1000x larger than the 7nm we see in modern chips, or is it close to 100x? Awesome work, I've always wondered what a hobbyist could do with all that we've learned about chip design over the years.
Replying to a year old comment but, judging from the UV light used to expose the photoresist, the resolution is best case between 150nm and 405nm, so 20x-70x larger than a 7nm process. Practically its probably closer to the um range which would be around 143x.
I feel so tiny! This is an impressive achievement!! And currently with all high tech companies having major production issues for lack of chips... I can’t stop wondering if it isn’t possible to implement solutions like these (scaled up) to provide a quickly deployable solution. I don’t think all tech equipment needs the state of the art chips.
Nice to come across this and thanks for for sharing the complexity while still entertaining the simpler hobbyist ability. Nice to see your knowledge and chip manufacturing capabilities is out there, just dumbfounded there's not more subscribers. But still nice to see this small following of ingenuity. Im going strait to your website.
@2:00 lets or just for the sake of comprehension I imagine a chip that is at a "comprehendible" size. In terms of units of transistors etc how about a million on a square foot A million on a square yard, 10 million on a 5x5 inch Im just thinking as your explaining, it makes so much sense I have to know more!
Quality content. This is exactly the type of channel I was looking for. Have you considered making leds using your maskless dpl method? Theoretically, would oil immersion under the objective lens give you more precision?
Nice set-up, I'm jealous! Have you considered using your gear to make zoneplates so that you can roll-your-own optics? I would have thought that monochromatic binary imaging would be well suited to that tech.
Thank you for sharing this, I have two questions please: 1-After you removed the colour rotation, you said I add some circuit, diode, could you please explain this a bit? any schematic or block diagram for that! 2-if it possible to put some links in the description for some items that you used, like the projector, lenses, UV glass... thanks again :)
This is very good! I like that it is maskless :D What I am not sure is your projector, could you build something better by buying a LCD and the lamp separated?
Hey! I have looked at many of your videos and also skimmed over your post/article about making your own IC a while back already, great stuff. However I have some questions about some things I either missed, don't remember right now or you simply haven't touched on before, so it'd be awesome if you could clarify. First off, the differential amplifier was made with PMOS technology, and I would assume making NMOS is then, relatively trivial. However I'd like to ask if your home lab is capable of producing CMOS circuits as well? Secondly, I have been having trouble finding out or perhaps understanding what the step(s) are to reducing and/or making the gate oxide layer. After the doping process the islands of thick oxide remain, but this is also the case for the islands that are supposed to become the gate oxide. So how would one get from having that thick oxide layer above the gate area of the substrate to having a sufficiently thin gate oxide layer without damaging the exposed (doped) silicon in the wells or dramatically reducing the oxide layer in areas where it is supposed to remain thick? And finally just a curious question - have you tested, and if so, then what is the average switching speed of the transistors you have made?
Great video! Just have a question, have you done any experiments with masks? once you have a design you want, could a home DIY setup get better (finer/clearer) detail making their own mask and using a similar microscope setup but developing a mask on a glass slide or something? or would the DLP always have better results resolution wise. I get the maskless/DLP approach has 3d printer type benefits of iteration, but was wondering if you could maybe get more detail if you developped a larger mask with DLP and then used a more columnated UV source. Just looking into all this stuff, the points about what you learned to solve those issues is a great benefit, thanks again
Even with a mask you need to scale down. Consider the Fourier optics of an infinity corrected scope, with a high ceiling in your lab, what is the difference between 1:10 or 1:40 minification?
09:12 - Any chance I can get you to elaborate on the difference in performance between this setup and the one using an unmodified projector and a microscope eye piece? "Performance" meaning the image-minimizing capability of each system?
Yeah, I always wondered why not use UV objectives. I think they come off the shelve for biology. Field of view seems to be like 50x50 um2 , but just gotta reduce feature size of something small like a 6502 until it fits. Step. SRAM bank. Step PPU.
Sam - that is really impressive! What brand/model projector is that?? 1080p is not the highest quality for ULSI+ however more than good enough for home and proto labs. I have been trying to find a projector with a native short arc or non-halogen lamp in it so the source wouldn't have to be swapped out. The IR-block filter was a great idea too. Very impressed with your work. -Fred
Very Interesting. Is there limitations with mask-less lithography that is not used more by IC companies? Because not having to use a mask could cut costs.
I was thinking about building something like this but it would be cool to instead of curing photo resist, it could cure resin for 3D printing micro fluidic devices
Makes me wonder if exposure time affects the "focus" on the photolithography due to the probability wave of light at nanoscale levels: as you accumulate more photons, would the image become less sharp? Obviously that doesn't matter at regular human scales of photography, but at the nano scale, maybe.
Wow, that's great project. Thanks for sharing and making such a great video. It's amazing that you were able to achieve such a small scale by using ordinary microscope. Keep going. Subscribed.
There are geeks, then there are crazy people, then there's you doing photolitography at home... Congrats, dude, I'm truly impressed!
we need open source hardware. we need to stop depending on a tiny oligarchy of chip makers.
Dude this is amazing. How can we contribute?
@user-vo9rv9ju9l 50 fold?? Ah ah, good joke. You're pregnant with hype. And you can start by watching Asianometry's videos on semiconductors so you can grasp a glance at the abstraction of how things work and the epic challenges lying ahead. Good luck understanding just the basics.
@@thechozoone8997 I THINK...BECOME MORE EDUCATED ON THIS TOPIC WOULD BE HELPFUL NAH?
This video took my understanding of chip production from "unfathomably complex mystery" to "you put a projector on a microscope."
Just slap it on there😭 millions saved
My favorite things in this video - the Cheese-It, and the "excuse" you made "I made this while a junior in high school". Love it!
People tell me similar things when they see me just building a plant monitoring and irrigation system with custom software or model and 3D print usable equipment but this guy is just amazing. I love the setup. Super impressed :D
You can. May just need limitless money.
Mild flex, that one, and well earned
the fact that you are taking on something so daunting and locked behind so many industry secrets, and are still able to actually make working chips is mind blowing and totally inspiring.
I think my last comment didn't make it? Anyway, just want to share, for anyone interested in doing something like this I can't post the link, but search an article by the name:
A maskless photolithographic prototyping system using a low-cost consumer projector and a microscope
by Musgraves, Close, and Tanenbaum
It's a write up on the exact system as in this video
@@earl-greenteaThanks
"I made this while I was l like a junior in high school." From the early days, watching your videos, I think about how awesome your parents must be. In "The Boy who Played with Fusion" there's a section considering unusually curious and ambitious children, contrasting protective vs. trusting parenting styles. For reflection, the world is a better place because you had what you needed.
I have a copy of that book. You are right. Sam Zeloof is of that class of person. I personally think just from this one video he's unusually gifted, if not a genius. And this kind of machine he has cobbled together from off the shelf parts is what I call creative genius. He's also open about his early prototypes, showing that it takes ongoing effort to evolve the design to what he is showing in the video. That's very generous of him so that the rest of us can see and be encouraged by his work. Bravo Sam Zeloof! You're just awesome. I'm subscribed.
I was desperate to do stuff like this as a kid, but my parents basically banned me from using any tools because they wanted me to go to school for dentistry or something… So I started using IV drugs instead. Just as exciting although a bit worse for your health.
it was the frustration of not being able to work with my hands and needing to find a creative outlet. Soon as I turned 20 I got clean, haven’t touched the stuff for 15 years and started multiple businesses doing technology and craftsmanship related things.
Parents.... let your kids do the shit they want to do, even if it’s crazy science stuff.
@@hullinstruments Thank you for sharing your story. Anyone who can pick themselves back up and carry on to better places is inspirational. Wishing you the best of success in all that you do.
@@hullinstruments this is kinda hilarious because dentists are basically mold & die makers with lower stakes
@@kentvanderveldencan I make one like that
The one down vote is from a Nikon or ASML sales rep. :P
300 likes from ASML recruiters tho.
Kudos for you! I was flabergasted when I viewed your video. Flabergasted but also with a big smile. I work 30 years for ASML as a project manager / unit manager in the mechanical engineering / mechatronics scope. I have seen a lot, but saw no one with a stepper in his shed. Interesting part is that ASML also started in a shed. Their first stepper was maybe even less sophisticated as yours. Once again kudos and hope you will stay in the high tech inidustry, I think you are gold.
This is a great video! It's reassuring to see that there's people in this world that on the same (or even higher) level of nerdiness!
Your channel is just as great! What a lovely corner of the internet to have found
I was so certain to find you watching this channel. Btw. his latest video gathered 120K views in 4 days ;-)
Thanks for commenting on this and getting the algorithm to suggest it to me. I'm interested in exploring photolithography and your videos have been very informative.
With brains like yours. I now understand why the computer was thought of and built. Thanks for existing at the same time as me.
Wow. This guy made his own litography process. Thats another level.
Okay, I don't say this to a lot of people, but you are actually amazing. It's hard to even fathom one person doing this himself, that which had taken multiple people so many years to even figure out.
Cheers, man. This is just incredible.
the number of different skillsets required for a DIY setup like this is awesome.
Yeah, but I'm not really sure that it's really that much cheaper to make your own CPUs so why bother? 🤔
@@Reth_Hard You find no value in creating something and learning how to do it?
I’m just amazed by whoever is bankrolling the setup. The kid must have rich parents.
@@larrybudexactly the consumer mindset is crazy.
I was wanting for more, thank you so much... How about creating a NAND gate and show the entire process? Starting with the design in paper and going to the fabrication and finally the test... YAY!
This channel is vastly underrated. Thanks for sharing, Sam. What an inspiration!
Sam, You are truly an inspirational young man. I have been in the semiconductor industry for over 40 years working with customers on designs of products using various electronics and all the various technical, project and logistical activities required to get an end product to market. Watching your video was mind blowing to me. When I was young, a crystal radio was one of my earliest projects as an elementary school age kid as I was drawn towards tech in my time. Your project makes my earliest experimentation look like cave man tech. Keep it up. I definitely will view more of your videos and look forward to seeing where you end up in your career. Awesome work and you opened my eyes to something I had never considered someone tackling at home. Made my day!
Seeing your ingenuity is very inspiring! This is something completely outside of my wheel house, but it's still fun to see something so complex be boiled down to it's fundamental pieces.
For low scale production is not very complex. In fact threre are opensource projects to be able to build very high resolution chips at "home" and cheap.
Frank Walter Do you have any links to those?
I spent 80% of the video yelling "Yes! Yes! That's perfect!" at the screen. I have done something similar except used a pulsed laser instead of the regular lamp that came with the projector while trying to make a laser based cell printer. I hadn't been able to get it to focus close up. I tried to use a machinist's lope but, meh, didn't really work. I had never even considered that all I had to do was flip the lens around! Clever as all heck! My goodness your channel is underrated.
So you used a DLP projector but changed the Hg lamp to a laser?
@@andreasv9472 yep a pulsed NdYAG laser that was in a hair removal laser straight off of ebay. Lining everything up was quite tricky. I had to keep the lamp and fan connected and going or else it refused to power on. Keeping everything out of the beam line required more duct tape than I would like to admit and I had to defocus the beam with a lens to be extra cautious about accidentally vaporizing the micromirrors (The laser can pack a mantis shrimp sized punch). Unfortunately I've been too busy with other projects to finish this one but I will soon. It was still able to form an image but it would occasionally break-down the air and (I suspect) form an opaque plasma which blocked out the center of the image. I had thought I had fried the mirrors but it was just a ball of plasma in the way and it didn't have any problems on the next shot!
@@pinethetree Any reason for a pulsed laser? I'm thinking that a continuous beam might decrease the chance of mid-air plasma balls.
@@andreasv9472 Tragically there is a reason. I am trying to print cells with laser assisted forward transfer which in less jargony english means: shoot the laser at some mylar and plasmize a bit of the surface of it so it (and whatever is on it) gets pushed forward. The reason I can't use a regular laser is twofold:
1. not powerful enough to vaporize anything unless it's quite a few watts and very well focused to a point (and I need not a point but a plane of high energy light).
2. yet somehow too powerful, oddly enough while the peak power of the pulsed laser is youj (huge) the average power is less than a regular continuous one! If I pointed the continuous one at the mylar film it would burn through in a half of a second, whereas even though the pulsed one can vaporize the metal part of the mylar it leaves the clear plastic part intact (which is kind of crazy).
As far as I know no one has ever even made a continuous laser that can break down air so while that would solve that problem, it's not that bad of a problem and it's a problem that's caused by me being too cheap to buy a concave lens to spread out the laser and instead using a convex one and letting the light go through the focus and then expand out from there. I guess it wasn't such a tragic thing after all. Thanks for asking by the way, I'll post here when I get it working.
@@pinethetree
Please make some videos about your projects! That sounds really cool!
This is genuinely one of the most intelligent people I have ever come across
I love you man! Please don't tell it to my wife! Do you understand the level of science you perform? I am trying to read semiconductor physics and still losing hair day by day. Respect man, respect.
It doesn't have to be anything incredible. We have to get to a point where every hobbyist has the opportunity to create their own high quality and resolution chips in their lab, economically. th-cam.com/video/McEK-sz-Y8c/w-d-xo.html In fact, there are many ways to make your chips economically, if we are talking about small scale. Some of these are also explained in the videos of this channel.
which books are you reading ? @Christopher\ Neufelt
F’in genius, wrapped up in a humble envelope. Man, you’re amazing! Anything I can say about you is an understatement.
This notification made my day. Thanks for taking your time to make these videos
😄
The human spectrum. I watch Tik Tok videos and see that side and than there is this guy. Next level man. Need more like you.
This is so great! I cannot even get up to bake some pancakes - and you're baking your own microchips, in home-lab, with self-built and modified equipment! Amazing!
Your analogy with google earth really put things into perspective, thanks sam.
Respect. This is above and beyond 99% of the enthusiasts.
I studied Printmaking in college and I am continued to be surprised how those processies and techniques overlap with electronics (etching copper, sdm stencils, pcb photo masking, using lead, and now this photolithography process). I find the connection pretty neat. Very interesting video, way above my skills and expertise though haha!
Live Forever and Prosper, Sam Zeloof and entire Zeloof Families, Past, Present and Future, Forever.
Thank
The Cheez-It was my favorite part. Clearly that was the superior choice of object to stand in for the wafer.
I just discovered your channel and wow. It kind of saddened me ngl. I saw myself doing great things once, but life caught up. I wish I could elaborate, but man... and we're probably age mates. I just went from purely lucky to very unlucky.
My academic advisor once told me you manufactur your own luck... I've spent a long time meditating on that. Let's just hope I can begin pick myself back up.
This guys makes me feel everything out there is so simple.
This is advanced and janky at the same time super impressed dude great job!
Amazing bat-cave
God, so genius! Who else would have even thought of doing photo lithography this way?
Sam, been a fan since your first few videos, and I find myself returning to them all the time. We're on the cusp of an open source ASIC revolution with Skywater and other players, and your work is really timely and appreciated, even if it just shows how accessible this could be in theory. I don't know if you've ever seen the "Build Your Own Metal Workshop" series by Dave Gingery, recently I've been unable to shake the idea of what it would take to make something like that but for DIY silicon/electronics, as impractical as that might be.
I found a paper about using "Bluray optical head for low cost laser lithography", available with those search terms, and other similar experiments with off the shelf 405nm laser systems, a process that I'm sure you've come across before. I was wondering if you had tried something like that? I can't imagine the years and effort it took to get down to the metal as much as you have, but I've been trying to find cheap, accessible ways to try this stuff with an eye at some sort of measurable success with low cost components and I thought that might be a good place to start too if you could build kits around cheap components capable of nano scale adjustment by design.
Hey Sam , you are great !!! I admire you and want you to keep doing what you do and always stay healthy and happy . Much respect
Your video will always reignite my hope for life.
This is a great achievement.
I did a bit of reading when DLPs first became available and the consumer devices were generally sensitive to UV light. I am not sure what the vulnerable component was but UV rated DLPs were special order.
How hard would it be to make logic onto a solar cell wafer. If you could have a solar powered temperature transmitter all on one die you could sprinkle them from a plane and monitor thousands of ground temperatures with a flyover.
So you accept the cost of energy to produce large Si crystals. Energy which this cell will never pay back (unless in space).
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt I am not happy about wasting energy. However sometimes th cost of getting energy to a remote location is more than the value in having the energy there unless you can eliminate the power line or the transport of liquid fuel by collecting sunshine using a energy intensive solar cell.
My proposal above was for a specific application that cannot be powered any other way so the complaint is not relevant.
Having a distributed generation grid will make it less vulnerable if that is desired (does not serve the people control agenda though) because it has to carry less current from a central generator. Using silicon cells for grid scale generation is probably not a viable idea yet. Perhaps eventually. Somewhere in the future of humanity we are fossil free, I believe we should investigate all options while we still have some fossil reserves and see which one is the viable one. Subsidies should be used with great caution but there should be total freedom to try any crazy idea.
@ actually now I do wonder how silicon is purified. Crystal grow is a technology to purify it. Maybe starting with clean sand and then some weird chemistry is good enough for solar cells.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt To make semiconductors that work well monocrystalline silicone is required. This is the blue solar cells. The cheaper and less efficient ones are the pink polycrystalline solar cells that generate enough power for a calculator.
Silicone was traditionally purified by zone crystallisation. A few passes provides very pure silicone.
The silicone is made by reducing silicone dioxide (sand) in some way. Possibly through an intermediary compound. Crude silicone can be made at home using a thermite reaction, saw a YT video recently on that topic.
Amazing video! By the way what projecter did you use?
Awesome as always! I can imagine that some day there will be some kind of fully integrated solution for semiconductor/microchip fabrication, something a bit like a 3d printer. Maybe I'll make it work someday.
Really? I can’t.
3D printers are already rather niche despite being very useful for prototyping or cheap one-off parts.
Such self-contained fab is pointless, because you already have FPGAs, which:
1. Are relatively cheap and capable (ignore the ongoing chip shortage)
2. Faster to prototype on (even moderate designs take little time to synthesize and flash)
For large volumes it will naturally be cheaper to pay a proper manufacturer. The resulting niche where small-scale, slower than SOA, house-made, expensive chips are reasonable would likely amount to, like, 4 people in the world. This doesn’t fare well for your idea.
Such videos make it look like chip design and manufacturing is a lot easier than it is. The process itself is straightforward, but debugging any issues is absolutely unreal. It’s really, really, *really* hard for nontrivial designs.
Hello Sam, I am wanting to create silicon wafers, Do you mind me asking, What projector are you using? You said in your TH-cam video that it was from Amazon, but I don’t want to buy one that will not be able to be modified. Thanks in advance. (This is a copy of the question I sent on your website)
Awesome stuff as always my man, I love your videos. They're super helpful! I'm thinking I'll finally jump down the rabbit hole on a new project this month and I wouldn't have a clue where to start if it wasn't for the wealth of knowledge on your site. Thanks!
Glad you enjoyed
@@SamZeloof, in this current chip crisis we’re in with cars, it would be interesting to see if some Americans (not wealthy individuals) could step up to the plate to start making some needed units.
Also, I feel certain there are special ones made that are covered by patents.
I've been watching your videos for a long time (years) and the day I get some time to get back to nerd-learn mode I'm totally going to assemble a setup like this. Props to you: you do excellent work.
This system reminds me of pulling air bubbles through a piece of taffy. No matter how small they're pulled together, the light beams don't overlap one another. You can pull it down as thin as you want and still see the distinct beams. Fucking A+, man!
Pretty nice fundamentals like a fab's process integrator. Keep it up Sam. Encourage you in your endeavors.
Great video! I've been waiting for a video that gives a fairly complete overview of your process. This is my favourite video of your let, I love the simple approach!
thinking about making a vid of the entire chip fab process :)
@@SamZeloof You could make that like a little mini-series, an episode for each major step along the way
@@SamZeloof pls share your achievements, have you hade multitransistor chips already?
@@jskratnyarlathotep8411 indeed sam.zeloof.xyz/first-ic/
I was desperate to do stuff like this as a kid, but my parents basically banned me from using any tools because they wanted me to go to school for dentistry or something… So I started using IV drugs instead. Just as exciting although a bit worse for your health.
it was the frustration of not being able to work with my hands and needing to find a creative outlet. Soon as I turned 20 I got clean, haven’t touched the stuff for 15 years and started multiple businesses doing technology and craftsmanship related things.
Parents.... let your kids do the shit they want to do, even if it’s crazy science stuff.
Duuude, whaaaat? U did this a junior in HS? Incredible. Keep On.
This is so cool, I wonder though, how do you align the pattern between different steps?
Also, have you considered designing a version of this to sell commercially? Even making it for 10's of thousands of dollars would be a massive discount from competitors.
Absolutely awesome work man! Are there any good papers your recommend checking out surrounding this sort of thing?
Hello Sam. I'm working on my own system based in your invaluable information. Thanks thanks and thanks. Please... Can you provide any references about the fine adjustment optics (8:25)?? I don't know what I need.
Fine setup *to explore* the technology.
I wonder though why the beamer and the microscope are left intact if it requires permanent modification - wouldn't it have been easier to deconstruct everything and to reconstruct a crude, but compact 'lithography machine' in which You can account for every parameter, because You have set up the entire chain of light source and quality lenses ?
I wonder also whether You had come across a 'benefit-effort-ratio' threshold of diminishing returns where smaller circuits may be more efficient, but requiring so much investment in comparison to... let's say some form of mere parallel computing with much larger chips ?
I don't fully understand the physics, yet - that's just what comes to mind when watching it.
I have to ask, and maybe you cover this in the video: roughly, what's the process node you're working with at this point? Is it 1000x larger than the 7nm we see in modern chips, or is it close to 100x? Awesome work, I've always wondered what a hobbyist could do with all that we've learned about chip design over the years.
Replying to a year old comment but, judging from the UV light used to expose the photoresist, the resolution is best case between 150nm and 405nm, so 20x-70x larger than a 7nm process. Practically its probably closer to the um range which would be around 143x.
I would be glad to see the 6502 which MOS produced 1976 . A small company at the time.
You freaking beast, you made it while you were a junior in HIGHSCHOOL? I barely knew that Chips were made of Silicon at the time!
I feel so tiny! This is an impressive achievement!! And currently with all high tech companies having major production issues for lack of chips... I can’t stop wondering if it isn’t possible to implement solutions like these (scaled up) to provide a quickly deployable solution. I don’t think all tech equipment needs the state of the art chips.
That’s what I’m thinking.
Its by far the most incredible DIY system i see in my life.From now on your my GuRu of lithography
Nice to come across this and thanks for for sharing the complexity while still entertaining the simpler hobbyist ability. Nice to see your knowledge and chip manufacturing capabilities is out there, just dumbfounded there's not more subscribers. But still nice to see this small following of ingenuity. Im going strait to your website.
i DONT GETR WHY THIS DOESNT HAVE A MIL VIEWS this is cool! YOU MADE THIS IN hs? WOW
@2:00 lets or just for the sake of comprehension
I imagine a chip that is at a "comprehendible" size. In terms of units of transistors etc how about a million on a square foot
A million on a square yard, 10 million on a 5x5 inch
Im just thinking as your explaining, it makes so much sense
I have to know more!
Quality content. This is exactly the type of channel I was looking for. Have you considered making leds using your maskless dpl method? Theoretically, would oil immersion under the objective lens give you more precision?
A part of me died when you rotated that microscope head by grabbing the objectives!
they look like cow udders, its a natural reflex to grab them ;D
This guy is just a real geniuse no kidding
Doing these and those in HOME is just crazy
lol I expected it to be super complicated but its actually fairly simple, thanks for the video!
Nice set-up, I'm jealous! Have you considered using your gear to make zoneplates so that you can roll-your-own optics? I would have thought that monochromatic binary imaging would be well suited to that tech.
Definitely, check out this guy its super cool th-cam.com/channels/26YLK0OEbLB3TCYxGh8xVQ.html
Thank you for sharing this,
I have two questions please:
1-After you removed the colour rotation, you said I add some circuit, diode, could you please explain this a bit? any schematic or block diagram for that!
2-if it possible to put some links in the description for some items that you used, like the projector, lenses, UV glass... thanks again :)
I needed to talk to you, I found this project very interesting.
This is very good! I like that it is maskless :D What I am not sure is your projector, could you build something better by buying a LCD and the lamp separated?
Hey!
I have looked at many of your videos and also skimmed over your post/article about making your own IC a while back already, great stuff. However I have some questions about some things I either missed, don't remember right now or you simply haven't touched on before, so it'd be awesome if you could clarify.
First off, the differential amplifier was made with PMOS technology, and I would assume making NMOS is then, relatively trivial. However I'd like to ask if your home lab is capable of producing CMOS circuits as well?
Secondly, I have been having trouble finding out or perhaps understanding what the step(s) are to reducing and/or making the gate oxide layer. After the doping process the islands of thick oxide remain, but this is also the case for the islands that are supposed to become the gate oxide. So how would one get from having that thick oxide layer above the gate area of the substrate to having a sufficiently thin gate oxide layer without damaging the exposed (doped) silicon in the wells or dramatically reducing the oxide layer in areas where it is supposed to remain thick?
And finally just a curious question - have you tested, and if so, then what is the average switching speed of the transistors you have made?
Casually making chips at home...
Your home:
Could using harmonic drives for the stepper avoid extra backlash ? Crazy work congrats
Can you ring up your mic level?? I love hearing you progress on your project. Keep it up I look forward to seeing you post
Technical skills aside you're a great presenter. Very enjoyable, thanks
Great video! Just have a question, have you done any experiments with masks? once you have a design you want, could a home DIY setup get better (finer/clearer) detail making their own mask and using a similar microscope setup but developing a mask on a glass slide or something? or would the DLP always have better results resolution wise. I get the maskless/DLP approach has 3d printer type benefits of iteration, but was wondering if you could maybe get more detail if you developped a larger mask with DLP and then used a more columnated UV source. Just looking into all this stuff, the points about what you learned to solve those issues is a great benefit, thanks again
Even with a mask you need to scale down. Consider the Fourier optics of an infinity corrected scope, with a high ceiling in your lab, what is the difference between 1:10 or 1:40 minification?
using a tiny microchip with movable mirrors to create a mirror image on your new silicon. badass.
Very awesome. I'm curious what safety measures, if any, you took when you were building this. Just protective eye-wear?
Smartest guy on TH-cam. Amazing
09:12 - Any chance I can get you to elaborate on the difference in performance between this setup and the one using an unmodified projector and a microscope eye piece? "Performance" meaning the image-minimizing capability of each system?
Yeah, I always wondered why not use UV objectives. I think they come off the shelve for biology. Field of view seems to be like 50x50 um2 , but just gotta reduce feature size of something small like a 6502 until it fits. Step. SRAM bank. Step PPU.
Fantastic and Fabulous work! Dare to dream, and keep on making! Thanks for sharing Sam!
They need to give you a job at AMD or sumn. This is honestly so advanced and cool
Well, they won't cause AMD buys their euipment from one of their manufacturers. So that's where he should go.
@@alexa.davronov1537
He should form a company to make legacy chips and also produce processors without hardware backdoors.
can you make a video about the photoresist and +/- developre and all chemical produts and thank you :-)
he've covered that a little already
th-cam.com/video/TrmqZ0hgAXk/w-d-xo.html
You are one bright young man... damn I am impressed
Could you share with me the full technical design of your photolithography machine, with its components, and from where to buy them please ???
You should check the quality of your uv pass filter to see if it coincides with your correction mask
PEB’s are used on positive not negative resist in my experience. They are not required unless standing waves will ruin your cd uniformity though.
Sam - that is really impressive! What brand/model projector is that?? 1080p is not the highest quality for ULSI+ however more than good enough for home and proto labs. I have been trying to find a projector with a native short arc or non-halogen lamp in it so the source wouldn't have to be swapped out. The IR-block filter was a great idea too. Very impressed with your work. -Fred
love this and the process of refining sand into silicon reaching my for you page
Very Interesting. Is there limitations with mask-less lithography that is not used more by IC companies? Because not having to use a mask could cut costs.
Size.
Yeah, of course, It's limited by physical beam effects that cause mask to be blurred.
Throughput.
What feature size do you think you can get now? Would a 4k projector make a difference?
There are now some 3d printers that use a similar UV concept to set resin, would shifting to one of those projectors possibly yeild results as well?
He has one in the background. The projector bulb is a smaller light so it's better suited for the task.
@SpencerLemay the one I saw I think was one that uses an lcd mask instead of a projector. Could be wrong and I'll check again
your cool and gave me morivation to build my dream project that being a very simplyfied and basic chip fab
As for the color wheel, just move out of the way but keep it connected and spinning. That way you dont need to fool the projector.
Hello great work!! What photoresist did you use? Can I use one that is normally used to make PCBs?
Calibration mask is such a great fix
Have you tried using a DLP-based resin 3D-printer (or the innards thereof) for this?… is it at all plausible to do it?
To create a mirror finish in resin you need sun-wavelength precision. IMHO it should work.
Really wish I had a lab like this, and the time to learn how to use it, really amazing
I was thinking about building something like this but it would be cool to instead of curing photo resist, it could cure resin for 3D printing micro fluidic devices
my dude, I love your videos! What do you do for living if you don't mind me asking
Dude, undelivered that is ... i have no words, really. rsrs
You're a wizard.
Makes me wonder if exposure time affects the "focus" on the photolithography due to the probability wave of light at nanoscale levels: as you accumulate more photons, would the image become less sharp? Obviously that doesn't matter at regular human scales of photography, but at the nano scale, maybe.
No, see double slit experiment.
Wow, that's great project. Thanks for sharing and making such a great video. It's amazing that you were able to achieve such a small scale by using ordinary microscope. Keep going. Subscribed.