Enlarge / Sam Zeloof accomplished this home made pc chip with 1,200 transistors, seen beneath a magnifying glass, in August 2021. (credit score: Sam Kang)
In August, chipmaker Intel revealed new particulars about its plan to construct a “mega-fab” on US soil, a $100 billion manufacturing unit the place 10,000 employees will make a brand new era of highly effective processors studded with billions of transistors. The identical month, 22-year-old Sam Zeloof introduced his personal semiconductor milestone. It was achieved alone in his household’s New Jersey storage, about 30 miles from the place the primary transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947.
With a group of salvaged and home made gear, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors. He had sliced up wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs utilizing ultraviolet gentle, and dunked them in acid by hand, documenting the method on YouTube and his weblog. “Perhaps it’s overconfidence, however I’ve a mentality that one other human figured it out, so I can, too, even when possibly it takes me longer,” he says.
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