"Z2" - Upgraded Homemade Silicon Chips

Mentioned a couple other times in this thread but I don't think anyone has linked Sam Zeloof's video of essentially doing this: [VIDEO] It's fantastic and I highly recommend watching it.

A guy named Sam Zeloof is fabbing functional chips in his garage. I think you might gain a lot from watching his videos about the process. [VIDEO]

This was mostly about making a silicon wafer. This video shows more detail on the rest of the process in a home lab: [VIDEO] (blog here: [LINK] )

Somewhat related: a high school student creating his own semiconductor fav in his parent’s garage on a "budget". [VIDEO] It’s a thoroughly interesting video, but I’m a bit disappointed he never took his idea any further than he did. I’d really love to see something like a 6502 being made at home.

That was actually a post here on HN just a few weeks ago. Here's one "point of entry" (to find the homepage and similar videos and pages): [VIDEO] "Upgraded Homemade Silicon Chips"

This is the best paper I've read in a long time -- this has to go in my "Top 10" favorite posts of all time on HN... (To PaulHoule: Another truly excellent post of yours to HN, thank you very much , the HN community and myself appreciate it greatly!) Anyway, let's delve into it -- here's the key quote, IMHO: >"As the previous discussion showed, SUBLEQ is, of course, not the target realization for optical computing. Its purpose is to showcase the simplest form a general-purpose optical computer could take and an intermediary step we take. It can be implemented with less than 100 logic gates and, given enough memory, able to emulate a full x86 with a graphics card running Windows and Doom™ loaded, while crunching AI models as a background task (admittedly all extremely slowly)." Now that is truly awesome! Also, it should be pointed out that if SUBLEQ could be implemented optically, it could also be implemented digitally, say, on the smallest of small gate count FPGA's... While such a FPGA Soft CPU would not be fast -- it would definitely be interesting, and probably very simple (comparatively!) to implement! (Also, it might be implementable on a tiny IC, for example, Sam Zeloof's "Z2" 1,000 gate IC: [VIDEO] ) Anyway, 5+ Stars for this excellent paper! Upvoted and favorited!

I'm surprised I'm not hearing of more homemade/small-scale attempts like Sam Zeloof's ( [VIDEO] ). Not that this is the same class of problem, but still.

It seems you're suggesting that every structure resembling a nation state will be destroyed and we'll end up in a Max Max style dystopia where books are used exclusively to start fires. This is a bit reductionist and simplistic. I'm failing to see how food shortages and displacement, even significant enough to affect a billion people, will destroy all of global civilization . There are estimated to be close to a million nuclear physics PhDs, and millions more non-PhD experts. Nuclear reactors are being constructed on every major continent. And while there is a global bottleneck for current-generation silicon, there are hobbyists who produce previous-generation microprocessors[1]. I've never disagreed that these events will be disruptive to supply chains, create shortages, stall innovation, or force us to reconstruct lost cutting-edge expertise or infrastructure. All of these seem like relatively small hiccoughs, not civilization-ending catastrophes. Recall that the Black Death, which killed nearly half of Europe, was shortly followed by the Renaissance. 1. [VIDEO]