Featured on the frontpage four years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043719 (22-year-old builds chips in his parents’ garage | 525 | Jan 23, 2022 | 347 comments)
I still recall being amazed reading and seeing it for the first time, and I have been eagerly awaiting to see what he been up to since starting Atomic Semi.
The article mentions, but doesn't explicitly state, that they're going to be using electron beam lithography. Makes sense for their low volume and/or prototype fab goal, but I'm curious how well that would work for prototyping to fab at high volume with the likes of TSMC or Intel.
I would assume that re-targeting a design to a different fab's process would change enough about it that you might as well just do verification in simulation rather than sidetrack through Fab2.
I don't get it. How is Jim Keller running a brand new, hard tech startup while being CEO of Tenstorrent at the same time?
There are rumors Qualcomm is going to buy Tenstorrent.
One of the most interesting technologies that is not about LLMs/AIs.
Great! Hopefully we can get 10 year behind technology from small fabs. There's so much you can do with a laptop from 2016
Global Foundries has lots of fabs with 10 year old+ processes....
With electron-beam lithography you can build transistors with gate lengths down to 1 to 3 nanometers.
Is this an ASML competitor?
No, quoting the article:
> only really suits prototyping and low-volume runs rather than high-volume production at commercial foundries
Aww, I really wanted a cottage industry of chip manufacturing
How could would ut be that your company or university or even at home has its own chip machine. Design your 5b transistor chip and bake and process it the same day. Doable I would say.