![]() ![]() “He has done things I would never have thought people could do.” Rothman’s initial reaction softened as he saw Zeloof’s progress. This is a garage,” says Mark Rothman, who has spent 40 years in chip engineering and now works at a company making technology for OLED screens. “My first reaction was that you couldn’t do it. His father asked a semiconductor engineer he knew to offer some safety advice. Zeloof’s family was supportive but also cautious. “I wanted to make a statement that we should be more careful when we hear that something’s impossible.” “The reason for doing it was honestly because I thought it would be funny,” he says. When Zeloof started blogging about his goals for the project, some industry experts emailed to tell him it was impossible. 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.Ĭomputer chip fabrication is sometimes described as the world’s most difficult and precise manufacturing process. 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. He made the first, much smaller one as a high school senior in 2018 he started making individual transistors a year before that. “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. 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. ![]() With a collection of salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors. It was achieved alone in his family’s New Jersey garage, about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947. The same month, 22-year-old Sam Zeloof announced his own semiconductor milestone. In August, chipmaker Intel revealed new details about its plan to build a “mega-fab” on US soil, a $100 billion factory where 10,000 workers will make a new generation of powerful processors studded with billions of transistors.
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