Making at home transistors, or even small-scale integrated circuits is not exceedingly difficult.
However, making at home a useful microcontroller or FPGA would require not only an electron-beam lithography machine, but also a ion-implantation machine, a diffusion furnace, a plasma-etch machine, a sputtering machine and a lot of other chemical equipment and measurement instruments.
All the equipment would have to be enclosed in a sealed room, with completely automated operation.
A miniature mask-less single-wafer processing fab could be made at a cost several orders of magnitude less than a real semiconductor fab, but the cost would still be of many millions of $.
With such a miniature fab, one might need a few weeks to produce a batch of IC's worth maybe $1000, so the cost of the equipment will never be recovered, which is why nobody does such a thing for commercial purposes.
In order to have distributed semiconductor fabs serving small communities around them, instead of having only a couple of fabs for the entire planet, one would need a revolution in the fabrication of the semiconductor manufacturing equipment itself, like SpaceX has done for rockets.
Only if the semiconductor manufacturing equipment would be the result of a completely automated mass production, which would reduce its cost by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, affordable small-scale but state-of-the-art fabs would be possible.
But such an evolution is contrary to everything that the big companies have done during the last 30 years, during which all smaller competitors have been eliminated, the production has become concentrated in quasi-monopolies and for the non-consumer products the companies now offer every year more and more expensive models, which are increasingly affordable only for other big companies and not for individuals or small businesses.
> With such a miniature fab, one might need a few weeks to produce a batch of IC's worth maybe $1000
Maybe?
Another point of view might be that in a few weeks you could produce a batch of ICs you can actually trust, that would be several orders of magnitude more valuable than the $1000 worth of equivalents from the untrusted global supply chain.
> However, making at home a useful microcontroller or FPGA would require not only an electron-beam lithography machine, but also a ion-implantation machine, a diffusion furnace, a plasma-etch machine, a sputtering machine and a lot of other chemical equipment and measurement instruments.
That ASU NanoFab has indeed almost everything that is needed.
It is weird that they do not have any ion implantation machine, because there are devices that are impossible to make without it. Even for simple MOS transistors, I am not aware of any other method for controlling the threshold voltage with enough precision. Perhaps whenever they need ion implantation they send the wafers to an external fab, with which they have a contract, to be done there.
Still, I find it hard to believe that all the equipment that they have costs less than 10 million $, unless it is bought second hand. There is indeed a market for slightly obsolete semiconductor manufacturing equipment, which has been replaced in some first tier fabs and now it is available at significant discounts for those who are content with it.
However, making at home a useful microcontroller or FPGA would require not only an electron-beam lithography machine, but also a ion-implantation machine, a diffusion furnace, a plasma-etch machine, a sputtering machine and a lot of other chemical equipment and measurement instruments.
All the equipment would have to be enclosed in a sealed room, with completely automated operation.
A miniature mask-less single-wafer processing fab could be made at a cost several orders of magnitude less than a real semiconductor fab, but the cost would still be of many millions of $.
With such a miniature fab, one might need a few weeks to produce a batch of IC's worth maybe $1000, so the cost of the equipment will never be recovered, which is why nobody does such a thing for commercial purposes.
In order to have distributed semiconductor fabs serving small communities around them, instead of having only a couple of fabs for the entire planet, one would need a revolution in the fabrication of the semiconductor manufacturing equipment itself, like SpaceX has done for rockets.
Only if the semiconductor manufacturing equipment would be the result of a completely automated mass production, which would reduce its cost by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, affordable small-scale but state-of-the-art fabs would be possible.
But such an evolution is contrary to everything that the big companies have done during the last 30 years, during which all smaller competitors have been eliminated, the production has become concentrated in quasi-monopolies and for the non-consumer products the companies now offer every year more and more expensive models, which are increasingly affordable only for other big companies and not for individuals or small businesses.