8 ms·

How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation

605 points by robertelder 5y ago

cwoolfe 5y ago
After all that hard work, sell it at a few cents per chip.
Cxckers 5y ago
As a film photography enthusiast, I love the parallels between making a chip and film development. I wonder if film developing was the original inspiration
- hedgehog 5y ago
  Photo etching is used for all kinds of things including making plates for printing, I'd guess that's the more direct ancestor.
- dfox 5y ago
  Direct ancestor probably is mask-and-tape PCB design process, where the optical step also serve to shrink the (hand made) mask to significantly smaller size of the final board. In fact silicon masks were for a long time designed using essentially same process. In fact if you want to make something mostly flat with small features some variation of photo etching process tends to be the easiest and most repeatable way to go about that.
hedgehog 5y ago
Nice illustrations, though step 16 is pretty much "Draw the rest of the F** owl."
- azalemeth 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure producing the monocrystalline ingot with seven 9's purity also counts as the "rest of the owl", along with basically every other step in this guide. I'm not even convinced that the sawing step is simple – thermal stresses, limitations, impurities, tool hardness and dimensional accuracy concerns, minimising material losses, etc. (I loved his butter knife).
  - hedgehog 5y ago
    Yeah fair. Pretty much every part of the process is bonkers. Just the light sources draw something like 1 megawatt and weigh over 100 tons (for extreme ultraviolet). EUV gets absorbed by everything including air, which is bad, but the light source requires plasma so somehow you need both the plasma and vacuum in the same machine without a window or whatever to separate them. Then the features on the chip are so small that random variance in the spatial distribution of landing photons causes defects. And that's just the light, it's amazing anyone can make the process work at all.
  - jkingsbery 5y ago
    The knife was a great touch! It did look like he was lining it up carefully... Also, it took me two passes through to notice the tooth brush in step 16.
showerst 5y ago
If you're into this, Huygens Optics has an awesome series where he builds a wafer stepper at home. His is a little less advanced than Sam Zeloofs but the videos are way better -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w0Z2Y5vaAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w0Z2Y5vaAQ
lsiunsuex 5y ago
I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???
- showerst 5y ago
  Asking how to work in chips is kind of like asking how to be an engineer -- there are a million sub-specialties so lots of paths. Generally the degrees are Electrical Engineering, with classes along the lines of https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-374-analysis-and-design-of-digital-integrated-circuits-fall-2003/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... (note that's from 2003, just an example) There's also a ton of physics, and chemical and industrial engineering in the process steps.
- irishloop 5y ago
  At the public university engineering program I attended in 2000ish (UConn), we offered CompSci (mostly software focused), CompEng (mostly hardware focused), and CompSci+Eng (a balance of both). Either Eng program included several courses on hardware-level EE courses and circuit design, hardware engineering, etc. One of the guys I did my senior design project with ended up working with AMD on processor stuff, so there are educational opportunities, I think you just need to be more on the CompEng/EE side of things and make it your focus.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- thrashh 5y ago
  …electrical engineer?
- zackmorris 5y ago
  I got my electrical and computer engineering (ECE) degree in 1999 from UIUC and learned everything but the very lowest-level chemistry, because I specialized in the VLSI (circuit design) side instead of fab. At that point, stuff like MIPS and the DEC Alpha were popular, and computers were just breaking the 1 GHz barrier. Unfortunately the dot bomb happened right after I graduated, and the anti-intellectual backlash of the early 2000s killed independent research during the outsourcing era, which never recovered. Sadly from my perspective, very little has changed in 20 years. Computers only reached about 3-4 GHz, and kept doubling down on single-threaded performance for so long that companies like Intel missed out on multicore. Only Apple with their M1 seems to have any will to venture outside of the status quo. The future is going to be 256+ symmetric cores with local memories that are virtualized to appear as a single coherent address space. But that could take another 20 years to get here. Meanwhile we're stuck with SIMD now instead of MIMD, so can't explore the interesting functional paradigms. Basically I see the world from a formal/academic standpoint, so I think in terms of stuff like functional programming, synchronous blocking communication, ray tracing, genetic algorithms, stuff like that. But the world went with imperative programming, nondetermistic async, rasterization, neural nets.. just really complicated and informal systems that are difficult to scale and personally I don't think much of. Like with software, honestly so much is wrong with the hardware world right now that it's ripe for disruption. Also hardware was a dying industry 20 years ago. We wanted fully programmable FPGAs to make our own processors, but they got mired in proprietary nonsense. There really isn't a solution right now. Maybe renting time at AWS blah. I feel a bit personally responsible for the lackluster innovation, because I wasn't there to help. I wasted it working a bunch of dead end jobs, trying to make rent like the rest of you. And writing text wall rants on forums that nobody will ever read anyway. So ya, don't be like me. Get involved, go work for a startup or a struggling company that has the resources to fix chips, and most importantly, have fun.
pitspotter2 5y ago
The hilarity illustrates an important point. We never just make a thing. A recipe or blueprint is a convenient fiction. Rather we participate in a dynamic evolving process which itself evolved through many cycles of copying, repetition and debugging. Even the first version wasn't strictly original because the idea was borrowed from elsewhere. 'Oh you work at the olive press. How would you like a job with this new-fangled printing machine?' And so on back to the initial and highly controversial creation of the Universe.
- AlanSE 5y ago
  You might not do great to start with computers, and instead, do better to start from the dawn of civilization. https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ What I got from this is that I could make homemade coal by myself, MAYBE. I don't know if there's any climate on Earth where I could eek out a net energy return on primitive crops. If there was no one telling me what to do, I would surely starve in early agricultural times. But hey, that's what the Pharaoh's for, amirite? Basic bronze tools are a mind-numbing mess to mentally process.
  - 7373737373 5y ago
    You might like this video "I tried blacksmithing and only got slightly burned": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HUg144liM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HUg144liM https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page also feels relevant
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    It's interesting to imagine the human experience of reality when living in such times.
- timthorn 5y ago
  Take a look at the Toaster Project if you want to see building an item from scratch carried through all the way: http://thetoasterproject.org/ http://thetoasterproject.org/
Koshkin 5y ago
Here's how you make a vacuum tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw
tnorthcutt 5y ago
Mentioned a couple other times in this thread but I don't think anyone has linked Sam Zeloof's video of essentially doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg It's fantastic and I highly recommend watching it.
gorgoiler 5y ago
It’s really really fun doing this in software. You should try it. Fetch decode execute cycle. Registers. Memory. An instruction set. An assembler. And plug it all into an emulator to watch your factorial(n) at work! Here’s one someone else made earlier: https://www.peterhigginson.co.uk/AQA/ https://www.peterhigginson.co.uk/AQA/ It’s rubbish. So is yours, but you’ve got to build it first before you can brag.
spideymans 5y ago
Anyone else stuck at step 3? :)
jiggawatts 5y ago
If you ever code something that "feels like a hack but it works," just remember that a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking. Not to oversimplify: first you have to flatten the rock and put lightning inside it. Source: https://twitter.com/daisyowl/status/841802094361235456 https://twitter.com/daisyowl/status/841802094361235456
- omegalulw 5y ago
  > If you ever code something that "feels like a hack but it works," just remember that a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking. Is the "rock" "thinking" though? What _is_ "thinking"? Another way to look at a CPU is as a rock that we "carved" to conduct electricity in a specific way. It doesn't think - we interpret how the electricity flew and "think".
  - orangepenguin 5y ago
    I asked my thinkingrock if it could think and it said yes. Really though, "thinking" is very hard to define. Do animals think? Do insects think? Do bacteria think? I'm sure somewhere we could find an example of a "living" thing that people consider to have thinking capability whose abilities are substantially more primitive than a CPU. So... why not say a CPU can think?
marcodiego 5y ago
For a real case of someone making integrated circuits at home, this boy did it: http://sam.zeloof.xyz/ http://sam.zeloof.xyz/ for real.
calebm 5y ago
Looks like magic
- wrycoder 5y ago
  Maxwell and Lord Kelvin would have no idea what it was all about.
kayson 5y ago
Circuit designer here - feel free to ask any questions about the manufacturing process, design etc. Having a thorough understanding of the process, I thought this was hilarious. But if you really want to understand the process, it's pretty terrible. It spends 10 steps on making a wafer, and then the bulk of the actual process is condensed to 16.
- freedomben 5y ago
  Not what you were offering so feel free to ignore this, but I'm super curious about RISC-V. Do you know if any serious attempts are happening to make RISC-V based systems? And if not, do you know why? Is it too raw/un-polished?
  - kayson 5y ago
    Not my area sorry!
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    RISC-V probably has the most "serious" effort of anything other than ARM and X86.
    - datameta 5y ago
      That's a fair estimate, but let's not forget IBM's Power architecture.
      - afr0ck 5y ago
        There is also Sparc and to a lesser extent MIPS. They are more mature than RISC-V and have a decent software ecosystem.
      - mhh__ 5y ago
        Power is very cool and I want a Power10 box a lot but I'm not sure if it's fair to really decide in it's favour because POWER is basically unobtainable whereas you can actually buy dev boards for RISC-V from SiFive.
capableweb 5y ago
I recall there being a game mentioned somewhere here on HN, where you start with basic logic gates (I think), and you build up a fundamental CPU at the end of the game, using the parts you discovered along the way. Problem is, I don't remember what the game is called, and no amount of searching seems to help me. Anyone know what it was called?
- mbil 5y ago
  perhaps this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28735441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28735441
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Yes, that was exactly it! "Turing Complete" it's called apparently, available at Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ Thanks
- krallja 5y ago
  NandGame? https://nandgame.com/ https://nandgame.com/
- mkirsche 5y ago
  That pixel based logic simulator, I made some years ago, might also entertain you: https://github.com/martinkirsche/wired-logic https://github.com/martinkirsche/wired-logic
- shhsshs 5y ago
  - Turing Complete (2-dimensional circuit building, mission-based): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ - NandGame (2-dimensional circuit building, mission-based): https://nandgame.com/ https://nandgame.com/ - Logic World (3-dimensional circuit building, no missions/goals yet): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054340/Logic_World/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054340/Logic_World/
- hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
GhettoComputers 5y ago
The article doesn't correspond to reality. >3) Now you have 98% concentrated silicon dioxide. Purify it to 99.9% pure silicon dioxide. >4) Purify it further to 99.9999999% polysilicon metal. >While cutting-edge nanometer scale features are not likely to be accessible for a hobbyist, micron-scale amateur chip fabrication does appear to be quite feasible. I have not tried this myself, but Sam Zeloof has, and you should definitely check out his YouTube channel. I think you could probably even build some basic chips with far less equipment than he has if you get the optics right. You could probably make it a hobby business selling cusom chips to other tech people! >A Word Of Caution: In case it wasn't already clear, I don't advise that anyone actually attempt making integrated circuits in their apartment in the manner shown in this video. The 'photoresist' and 'developer solution' in this video is just a colored prop. The real chemicals are usually hazardous and you should only work with them with proper safety gear in a well ventilated area or in a fume hood. Its outdated and in reality you would go to Shenzhen or use a custom fab to make custom designed chips with raw materials sourced from special exotic materials that only make sense for scaled operation. I highlighted the steps 3 and 4 because its not how its done at all. High grade silicon is obtained in a pure state and doped for the chips rather than obtaining random types and refining them. Its not even easy compared to homemade nuclear reactors, which need a lot of natural sources of uranium to enrich but can be done, the refinement is more related to older germanium chips.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  He’s explaining, as crudely as possible, what’s going on in the semiconductor industry as a whole. Even Shenzen and TSMC are only small parts of it. High purity polysilicon is still produced by zone refining.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Yes it is refined and doped, my point is that he leaves out the sourcing of essential materials that you don't refine but must get that is already pure, it has to be purer than any random silicon its like saying just get any sand that people will assume comes from beaches for construction when its essential that they are not worn or have rounded edges, except this is so specialized that it must come from one mine in the world. The limit was well understood in Soviet Russia with their inability to source the raw materials of comparable purity to produce microchips, even if the design was the same, the USSR was not able to produce them without what is considered essential to chips of good quality. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0065245808605355?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00652... Even today China cannot match the quality of American chips and relies on US raw materials from Spruce Pine for manufacturing chips. It isn't optional, its like saying you can make a 1:1 steak with nothing but beef bones or chicken. https://ashvegas.com/bbc-report-spruce-pines-high-quality-quartz-is-at-heart-of-billion-dollar-computer-chip-industry/ https://ashvegas.com/bbc-report-spruce-pines-high-quality-qu... >This ultra-pure mineral is essential for building most of the world’s silicon chips – without which you wouldn’t be reading this article.
mataug 5y ago
So if I somehow time travelled to ~1800 there's no way I'm making my own modern computer ?! Jokes aside, its fascinating to see how complex computers are under the many layers of abstraction that we've built on top of them.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  You can start with figuring out how to make good insulated wire and then try to invent the generator and the transformer.
nynx 5y ago
It'd be really awesome if microprocessors, even at a low-end process node like 130 nm, could be made with room-sized machines or smaller. There's a lot of space for companies wanted to manufacture their own MCUs, for instance, without relying on massive supply chains. I think this'll happen at some point, as silicon manufacturing hits final roadblocks and becomes increasingly commoditized, but it'd be nice if it were sooner rather than later. (This would be nice for self-sufficient decentralized communities being able to produce their own microelectronics as well.)
- adminscoffee 5y ago
  yeah you are onto something. massive supply chains have a ton of carbon footprint. which some people that doesn't matter but for someone like myself, i am a bigger fan of less carbon emissions. i wonder if there is a way we can build an etching machine and print chips somehow, the process seems a little clearer after watching this simplified video. i think it can be done, everything complex is just a bunch of simple steps, solve each step and get closer to the goal. might be fun to create a github type community where people push their ideas to a source control platform where others can chime in and give their input. so like open source chip manufacturing, kinda like how 3d printers started out with makerbot and other open source printer projects. i think it can be done and it would be fun. we have to filter out people who have a vested interest in chip manufacturers because they may try to over complicate the process to protect their purse. so like a vouch system, where we know the people coming in have the right heart and won't purposely screw up moral
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    I think it's extremely unlikely that a small scale DIY process would be more energy efficient than using existing fabs.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    > massive supply chains have a ton of carbon footprint Are you talking about distribution? Because I would have thought the small size/weight of wafers would mean those costs would be fairly small. Maybe (silicon) packaging could be done locally, but even then packaged chips weigh little.
aligray 5y ago
I found this absolutely hilarious and I’m not entirely sure why, just the tone of the instructions as if it’s an ordinary thing to make in an afternoon. Brilliant.
jay754 5y ago
This is absolutely gold. Very informative and hilarious pics.
belval 5y ago
For those who wants more, the wikipedia article on semiconductor manufacturing is actually pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabricati...
anthk 5y ago
More info on homemade raw sources and processes: https://simplifier.neocities.org/ https://simplifier.neocities.org/
xivzgrev 5y ago
I was successfully able to follow step 1 and 2. Grab a rock. Crush a rock. Easy peasy. Gave up on step 3: purify. Glad I did: each step after got more and more ridiculous.
rhdxmr 5y ago
A much fun article! Thanks

605 points by robertelder 5y ago

After all that hard work, sell it at a few cents per chip.

As a film photography enthusiast, I love the parallels between making a chip and film development. I wonder if film developing was the original inspiration

hedgehog 5y ago
Photo etching is used for all kinds of things including making plates for printing, I'd guess that's the more direct ancestor.
dfox 5y ago
Direct ancestor probably is mask-and-tape PCB design process, where the optical step also serve to shrink the (hand made) mask to significantly smaller size of the final board. In fact silicon masks were for a long time designed using essentially same process. In fact if you want to make something mostly flat with small features some variation of photo etching process tends to be the easiest and most repeatable way to go about that.

hedgehog 5y ago

Nice illustrations, though step 16 is pretty much "Draw the rest of the F** owl."

azalemeth 5y ago
I'm pretty sure producing the monocrystalline ingot with seven 9's purity also counts as the "rest of the owl", along with basically every other step in this guide. I'm not even convinced that the sawing step is simple – thermal stresses, limitations, impurities, tool hardness and dimensional accuracy concerns, minimising material losses, etc. (I loved his butter knife).
- hedgehog 5y ago
  Yeah fair. Pretty much every part of the process is bonkers. Just the light sources draw something like 1 megawatt and weigh over 100 tons (for extreme ultraviolet). EUV gets absorbed by everything including air, which is bad, but the light source requires plasma so somehow you need both the plasma and vacuum in the same machine without a window or whatever to separate them. Then the features on the chip are so small that random variance in the spatial distribution of landing photons causes defects. And that's just the light, it's amazing anyone can make the process work at all.
- jkingsbery 5y ago
  The knife was a great touch! It did look like he was lining it up carefully... Also, it took me two passes through to notice the tooth brush in step 16.

showerst 5y ago

If you're into this, Huygens Optics has an awesome series where he builds a wafer stepper at home. His is a little less advanced than Sam Zeloofs but the videos are way better -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w0Z2Y5vaAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w0Z2Y5vaAQ

lsiunsuex 5y ago

I've always been curious how someone gets into this line of work. Is it all via college / post education and your directly recruited by these companies? Obviously, this is a very hard (impossible?) thing to teach yourself. I can't imagine more than a few universities offer this type of education? Where would you start / what path would you go down to be a chip designer / work for an Intel / AMD ???

showerst 5y ago
Asking how to work in chips is kind of like asking how to be an engineer -- there are a million sub-specialties so lots of paths. Generally the degrees are Electrical Engineering, with classes along the lines of https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-374-analysis-and-design-of-digital-integrated-circuits-fall-2003/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... (note that's from 2003, just an example) There's also a ton of physics, and chemical and industrial engineering in the process steps.
irishloop 5y ago
At the public university engineering program I attended in 2000ish (UConn), we offered CompSci (mostly software focused), CompEng (mostly hardware focused), and CompSci+Eng (a balance of both). Either Eng program included several courses on hardware-level EE courses and circuit design, hardware engineering, etc. One of the guys I did my senior design project with ended up working with AMD on processor stuff, so there are educational opportunities, I think you just need to be more on the CompEng/EE side of things and make it your focus.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
thrashh 5y ago
…electrical engineer?
zackmorris 5y ago
I got my electrical and computer engineering (ECE) degree in 1999 from UIUC and learned everything but the very lowest-level chemistry, because I specialized in the VLSI (circuit design) side instead of fab. At that point, stuff like MIPS and the DEC Alpha were popular, and computers were just breaking the 1 GHz barrier. Unfortunately the dot bomb happened right after I graduated, and the anti-intellectual backlash of the early 2000s killed independent research during the outsourcing era, which never recovered. Sadly from my perspective, very little has changed in 20 years. Computers only reached about 3-4 GHz, and kept doubling down on single-threaded performance for so long that companies like Intel missed out on multicore. Only Apple with their M1 seems to have any will to venture outside of the status quo. The future is going to be 256+ symmetric cores with local memories that are virtualized to appear as a single coherent address space. But that could take another 20 years to get here. Meanwhile we're stuck with SIMD now instead of MIMD, so can't explore the interesting functional paradigms. Basically I see the world from a formal/academic standpoint, so I think in terms of stuff like functional programming, synchronous blocking communication, ray tracing, genetic algorithms, stuff like that. But the world went with imperative programming, nondetermistic async, rasterization, neural nets.. just really complicated and informal systems that are difficult to scale and personally I don't think much of. Like with software, honestly so much is wrong with the hardware world right now that it's ripe for disruption. Also hardware was a dying industry 20 years ago. We wanted fully programmable FPGAs to make our own processors, but they got mired in proprietary nonsense. There really isn't a solution right now. Maybe renting time at AWS blah. I feel a bit personally responsible for the lackluster innovation, because I wasn't there to help. I wasted it working a bunch of dead end jobs, trying to make rent like the rest of you. And writing text wall rants on forums that nobody will ever read anyway. So ya, don't be like me. Get involved, go work for a startup or a struggling company that has the resources to fix chips, and most importantly, have fun.

pitspotter2 5y ago

The hilarity illustrates an important point. We never just make a thing. A recipe or blueprint is a convenient fiction. Rather we participate in a dynamic evolving process which itself evolved through many cycles of copying, repetition and debugging. Even the first version wasn't strictly original because the idea was borrowed from elsewhere. 'Oh you work at the olive press. How would you like a job with this new-fangled printing machine?' And so on back to the initial and highly controversial creation of the Universe.

AlanSE 5y ago
You might not do great to start with computers, and instead, do better to start from the dawn of civilization. https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ What I got from this is that I could make homemade coal by myself, MAYBE. I don't know if there's any climate on Earth where I could eek out a net energy return on primitive crops. If there was no one telling me what to do, I would surely starve in early agricultural times. But hey, that's what the Pharaoh's for, amirite? Basic bronze tools are a mind-numbing mess to mentally process.
- 7373737373 5y ago
  You might like this video "I tried blacksmithing and only got slightly burned": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HUg144liM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HUg144liM https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page https://bootstrapping.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page also feels relevant
- agumonkey 5y ago
  It's interesting to imagine the human experience of reality when living in such times.
timthorn 5y ago
Take a look at the Toaster Project if you want to see building an item from scratch carried through all the way: http://thetoasterproject.org/ http://thetoasterproject.org/

Koshkin 5y ago

Here's how you make a vacuum tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw

tnorthcutt 5y ago

Mentioned a couple other times in this thread but I don't think anyone has linked Sam Zeloof's video of essentially doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg It's fantastic and I highly recommend watching it.

gorgoiler 5y ago

It’s really really fun doing this in software. You should try it. Fetch decode execute cycle. Registers. Memory. An instruction set. An assembler. And plug it all into an emulator to watch your factorial(n) at work! Here’s one someone else made earlier: https://www.peterhigginson.co.uk/AQA/ https://www.peterhigginson.co.uk/AQA/ It’s rubbish. So is yours, but you’ve got to build it first before you can brag.

spideymans 5y ago

Anyone else stuck at step 3? :)

jiggawatts 5y ago

If you ever code something that "feels like a hack but it works," just remember that a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking. Not to oversimplify: first you have to flatten the rock and put lightning inside it. Source: https://twitter.com/daisyowl/status/841802094361235456 https://twitter.com/daisyowl/status/841802094361235456

omegalulw 5y ago
> If you ever code something that "feels like a hack but it works," just remember that a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking. Is the "rock" "thinking" though? What _is_ "thinking"? Another way to look at a CPU is as a rock that we "carved" to conduct electricity in a specific way. It doesn't think - we interpret how the electricity flew and "think".
- orangepenguin 5y ago
  I asked my thinkingrock if it could think and it said yes. Really though, "thinking" is very hard to define. Do animals think? Do insects think? Do bacteria think? I'm sure somewhere we could find an example of a "living" thing that people consider to have thinking capability whose abilities are substantially more primitive than a CPU. So... why not say a CPU can think?

marcodiego 5y ago

For a real case of someone making integrated circuits at home, this boy did it: http://sam.zeloof.xyz/ http://sam.zeloof.xyz/ for real.

calebm 5y ago

Looks like magic

wrycoder 5y ago
Maxwell and Lord Kelvin would have no idea what it was all about.

kayson 5y ago

Circuit designer here - feel free to ask any questions about the manufacturing process, design etc. Having a thorough understanding of the process, I thought this was hilarious. But if you really want to understand the process, it's pretty terrible. It spends 10 steps on making a wafer, and then the bulk of the actual process is condensed to 16.

freedomben 5y ago
Not what you were offering so feel free to ignore this, but I'm super curious about RISC-V. Do you know if any serious attempts are happening to make RISC-V based systems? And if not, do you know why? Is it too raw/un-polished?
- kayson 5y ago
  Not my area sorry!
- mhh__ 5y ago
  RISC-V probably has the most "serious" effort of anything other than ARM and X86.
  - datameta 5y ago
    That's a fair estimate, but let's not forget IBM's Power architecture.
    - afr0ck 5y ago
      There is also Sparc and to a lesser extent MIPS. They are more mature than RISC-V and have a decent software ecosystem.
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      Power is very cool and I want a Power10 box a lot but I'm not sure if it's fair to really decide in it's favour because POWER is basically unobtainable whereas you can actually buy dev boards for RISC-V from SiFive.

capableweb 5y ago

I recall there being a game mentioned somewhere here on HN, where you start with basic logic gates (I think), and you build up a fundamental CPU at the end of the game, using the parts you discovered along the way. Problem is, I don't remember what the game is called, and no amount of searching seems to help me. Anyone know what it was called?

mbil 5y ago
perhaps this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28735441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28735441
- capableweb 5y ago
  Yes, that was exactly it! "Turing Complete" it's called apparently, available at Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ Thanks
krallja 5y ago
NandGame? https://nandgame.com/ https://nandgame.com/
mkirsche 5y ago
That pixel based logic simulator, I made some years ago, might also entertain you: https://github.com/martinkirsche/wired-logic https://github.com/martinkirsche/wired-logic
shhsshs 5y ago
- Turing Complete (2-dimensional circuit building, mission-based): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ - NandGame (2-dimensional circuit building, mission-based): https://nandgame.com/ https://nandgame.com/ - Logic World (3-dimensional circuit building, no missions/goals yet): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054340/Logic_World/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054340/Logic_World/
hoppyhoppy2 5y ago

GhettoComputers 5y ago

The article doesn't correspond to reality. >3) Now you have 98% concentrated silicon dioxide. Purify it to 99.9% pure silicon dioxide. >4) Purify it further to 99.9999999% polysilicon metal. >While cutting-edge nanometer scale features are not likely to be accessible for a hobbyist, micron-scale amateur chip fabrication does appear to be quite feasible. I have not tried this myself, but Sam Zeloof has, and you should definitely check out his YouTube channel. I think you could probably even build some basic chips with far less equipment than he has if you get the optics right. You could probably make it a hobby business selling cusom chips to other tech people! >A Word Of Caution: In case it wasn't already clear, I don't advise that anyone actually attempt making integrated circuits in their apartment in the manner shown in this video. The 'photoresist' and 'developer solution' in this video is just a colored prop. The real chemicals are usually hazardous and you should only work with them with proper safety gear in a well ventilated area or in a fume hood. Its outdated and in reality you would go to Shenzhen or use a custom fab to make custom designed chips with raw materials sourced from special exotic materials that only make sense for scaled operation. I highlighted the steps 3 and 4 because its not how its done at all. High grade silicon is obtained in a pure state and doped for the chips rather than obtaining random types and refining them. Its not even easy compared to homemade nuclear reactors, which need a lot of natural sources of uranium to enrich but can be done, the refinement is more related to older germanium chips.

wrycoder 5y ago
He’s explaining, as crudely as possible, what’s going on in the semiconductor industry as a whole. Even Shenzen and TSMC are only small parts of it. High purity polysilicon is still produced by zone refining.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Yes it is refined and doped, my point is that he leaves out the sourcing of essential materials that you don't refine but must get that is already pure, it has to be purer than any random silicon its like saying just get any sand that people will assume comes from beaches for construction when its essential that they are not worn or have rounded edges, except this is so specialized that it must come from one mine in the world. The limit was well understood in Soviet Russia with their inability to source the raw materials of comparable purity to produce microchips, even if the design was the same, the USSR was not able to produce them without what is considered essential to chips of good quality. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0065245808605355?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00652... Even today China cannot match the quality of American chips and relies on US raw materials from Spruce Pine for manufacturing chips. It isn't optional, its like saying you can make a 1:1 steak with nothing but beef bones or chicken. https://ashvegas.com/bbc-report-spruce-pines-high-quality-quartz-is-at-heart-of-billion-dollar-computer-chip-industry/ https://ashvegas.com/bbc-report-spruce-pines-high-quality-qu... >This ultra-pure mineral is essential for building most of the world’s silicon chips – without which you wouldn’t be reading this article.

mataug 5y ago

So if I somehow time travelled to ~1800 there's no way I'm making my own modern computer ?! Jokes aside, its fascinating to see how complex computers are under the many layers of abstraction that we've built on top of them.

wrycoder 5y ago
You can start with figuring out how to make good insulated wire and then try to invent the generator and the transformer.

nynx 5y ago

It'd be really awesome if microprocessors, even at a low-end process node like 130 nm, could be made with room-sized machines or smaller. There's a lot of space for companies wanted to manufacture their own MCUs, for instance, without relying on massive supply chains. I think this'll happen at some point, as silicon manufacturing hits final roadblocks and becomes increasingly commoditized, but it'd be nice if it were sooner rather than later. (This would be nice for self-sufficient decentralized communities being able to produce their own microelectronics as well.)

adminscoffee 5y ago
yeah you are onto something. massive supply chains have a ton of carbon footprint. which some people that doesn't matter but for someone like myself, i am a bigger fan of less carbon emissions. i wonder if there is a way we can build an etching machine and print chips somehow, the process seems a little clearer after watching this simplified video. i think it can be done, everything complex is just a bunch of simple steps, solve each step and get closer to the goal. might be fun to create a github type community where people push their ideas to a source control platform where others can chime in and give their input. so like open source chip manufacturing, kinda like how 3d printers started out with makerbot and other open source printer projects. i think it can be done and it would be fun. we have to filter out people who have a vested interest in chip manufacturers because they may try to over complicate the process to protect their purse. so like a vouch system, where we know the people coming in have the right heart and won't purposely screw up moral
- cinntaile 5y ago
  I think it's extremely unlikely that a small scale DIY process would be more energy efficient than using existing fabs.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  > massive supply chains have a ton of carbon footprint Are you talking about distribution? Because I would have thought the small size/weight of wafers would mean those costs would be fairly small. Maybe (silicon) packaging could be done locally, but even then packaged chips weigh little.

aligray 5y ago

I found this absolutely hilarious and I’m not entirely sure why, just the tone of the instructions as if it’s an ordinary thing to make in an afternoon. Brilliant.

jay754 5y ago

This is absolutely gold. Very informative and hilarious pics.

belval 5y ago

For those who wants more, the wikipedia article on semiconductor manufacturing is actually pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabricati...

anthk 5y ago

More info on homemade raw sources and processes: https://simplifier.neocities.org/ https://simplifier.neocities.org/

xivzgrev 5y ago

I was successfully able to follow step 1 and 2. Grab a rock. Crush a rock. Easy peasy. Gave up on step 3: purify. Glad I did: each step after got more and more ridiculous.

rhdxmr 5y ago

A much fun article! Thanks