This 22-Year-Old Builds Semiconductors in His Parents Garage

Wired reports on 22-year-old Sam Zeloof, who builds semiconductors in his family's New Jersey garage, "about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947." With a collection of salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors. He had sliced up wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs using ultraviolet light, and dunked them in acid by hand, documenting the process on YouTube and his blog. "Maybe it's overconfidence, but I have a mentality that another human figured it out, so I can too, even if maybe it takes me longer," he says... His chips lag Intel's by technological eons, but Zeloof argues only half-jokingly that he's making faster progress than the semiconductor industry did in its early days. His second chip has 200 times as many transistors as his first, a growth rate outpacing Moore's law, the rule of thumb coined by an Intel cofounder that says the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. Zeloof now hopes to match the scale of Intel's breakthrough 4004 chip from 1971, the first commercial microprocessor, which had 2,300 transistors and was used in calculators and other business machines. In December, he started work on an interim circuit design that can perform simple addition.... Garage-built chips aren't about to power your PlayStation, but Zeloof says his unusual hobby has convinced him that society would benefit from chipmaking being more accessible to inventors without multimillion-dollar budgets. "That really high barrier to entry will make you super risk-averse, and that's bad for innovation," Zeloof says.

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