Sam Zeloof combines 1970s-era machines with homemade designs. His creations show what’s possible for small-scale silicon tinkerers.
Zeloof fixes up obsolete equipment bought online, including an electron microscope, to make his chips.At times Zeloof had to improvise. As in a real chip fab, he wanted to transfer his microscopically detailed designs onto his devices using a process called photolithography. It involves coating a chip-to-be in light-sensitive material and using a device like a super-precise projector to burn in a template that will guide subsequent processing steps.
The Z1 used transistors that Zeloof calls “straight out of the 1970s,” with features as small as 175 microns, roughly a hairsbreadth. He put the chips to work in a circuit board that flashes a single LED and aLate in 2018, Zeloof started at Carnegie Mellon University, hacking on pieces of garage fab equipment in his dorm room while studying electrical engineering. Although he says he followed safety protocols, the university took exception to the x-ray machine in his dorm room.
Zeloof’s first chip, the Z1, was made in 2018 when he was still in high school and has six transistors.His second chip, the Z2, was finished in August 2021 and has 1,200 transistors.Zeloof is working on the Z3, a chip that will be capable of adding 1 + 1, as a step to a full microprocessor.Each chip was then etched with acid and cooked in a furnace at about 1,000 degrees Celsius to bake in phosphorus atoms to adjust its conductivity.
Zeloof says he doesn’t know for sure what he wants to do after graduating this spring, but he has been thinking about the place DIY chipmaking might have in the modern tech ecosystem. In many ways DIY experimentation has never been more powerful: Robotics gear and 3D printers are easily bought, and hacker-friendly hardware like the Arduino microcontroller andare well established. “But the chips are still made in a big factory somewhere,” Zeloof says.
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