Subject: Can one make their own chips?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed Mar 12 12:18:16 2003

> you can't make a 8008 chip from scratch

In the discussion of wafers it made me wonder if one could lay down their own 
design in Silicon. or duplicate an early design like the 8008 (lets not get 
into a discussion of copyrights).

Does anyone collect FAB equipment? A small clean room would not be hard to 
set up. At one time I saw a 3 inch mask aligner go for $25. I bought the 4 
inch Mask Aligner for $150. There is so much old FAB Equipment around it 
seems one should be able to set up a home lab. Does anyone know of one in 
existence?

Paxton
Astoria, OR

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From: ben franchuk <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Mar 12 12:29:00 2003

> seems one should be able to set up a home lab. Does anyone know of one in 

What is copywrite and more secret is the exact chemicals and other 
details involved in the process. Remember you need to 99.99999% correct
for the whole thing to work.
Ben.

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From: "TeoZ" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Mar 12 13:28:01 2003

You mean a real working lab?

Even if you could legally get all the chemicals to do all the chemical
baths, there is no way you could get the permit to do it in your house.
Diffusion ovens would be a pain, along with power requirements, ultrapure
water + heater, etc. Even if you could make the chip on a wafer (and all
your equipment has to be for that size wafer), you still need the equipment
to turn the silicon into a chip like the chip cutting machine, plastic
encapolating stuff, and the gold wiring interconnects to the outside pins.
Getting all this into a class 100 cleanroom with associated hepa filters and
climate control would be interesting, that and what would you do with the
waste products?

Would be cheaper to have a design made at some chip foundry

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From: "Peter C. Wallace" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Mar 12 13:50:00 2003

> climate control would be interesting, that and what would you do with the

Gee, dump the in the trash like the big companies used to do...

(Remembering stories from friend of mine that used to work at Signetics
joking about how often the white elephants in back of the fab caught fire...)

> > seems one should be able to set up a home lab. Does anyone know of one in

Peter Wallace
Mesa Electronics

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From: "Hans Franke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Mar 13 03:22:00 2003

> seems one should be able to set up a home lab. Does anyone know of one in 

Well, I could add a stepper table from the first 16K prototype
production here at Siemens (now Infinion) ... Beside that, I
think it may be ceaper to use comercial available capacities.

Gruss
H.

--
VCF Europa 4.0 am 03./04. Mai 2003 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/