Did anyone ever use different coloured ferrites to make cool patterns? I&#x27;d have thought that&#x27;d be a no-brainer, Navajo blanket core memory!

Did anyone forget that core memory is woven ? With knitting, beads and everything ?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;3173574.3174105" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;3173574.3174105</a>

I do but my days in the fab taught me that you do NOT want people to do this, considering the extremely dangerous chemicals involved. People have died changing EMPTY tanks of phosphine gas used for doping… and HF acid used for etch is another nightmare entirely.

While that would be cool, something like the 7400 series, is already pretty close to scratching that itch. And a lot less dangerous.

Admit it, deep down, our inner engeering child also wants to build a semiconductor clean room ;)

You mean at the RAMch? I&#x27;ll see myself out now

&gt;I get my DRAM needs at the RAM ranch.18GB at a time

I only have raw RAM, pastured RAM is wrong.I get my DRAM needs at the RAM ranch.

I put myself in the print-it-yourself-at-home group.

I only buy free-range artisanal DRAM at the DRAM farmer&#x27;s market.

I think he plans to go far beyond just making RAM in that clean room. This is pure speculation, but I suspect the goal of that channel is to just make doom from scratch.Given that the shed in this guy’s backyard is already approaching the entire national technological output of any country in the 1970s I think he may get there.

Agree with the sentiment, but “news for nerds” is Slashdot.

There&#x27;s no mention of AGI, climate change, AWS outages, Trump, crypto schadenfreude or my new MVP that you should totally sign up for even though I just vibe coded it 20 minutes ago and the DNS hasn&#x27;t fully propagated yet, but the API is amazing plz like comment and subscribe.Ok, maybe I&#x27;m being a bit cynical. Stories about bikeable cities are welcome too. And wasn&#x27;t Soylent popular for a hot minute back in the day?

Yeah but it&#x27;s a YouTube video. Those tend not to do super well on the front page.

You’re not sure if someone building a RAM clean room in a shed is appropriate for HackerNews, literally “news for nerds”? A dictionary purchase may be warranted

Videos in general don’t get much traction here. Most of the time I don’t want to watch them in this context either, when other sites I do.Maybe it’s just I come here for the old web feel when video was costly, rare and short.

If you haven&#x27;t seen this one, I highly recommend it:Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4&amp;t=2070s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4&amp;t=2070s</a>It&#x27;s quite old but I think there is no modern version of it.I&#x27;ve tried posting to HN a few times but it hasn&#x27;t gained traction for some reason, but I find it absolutely mind blowing.

I think if it&#x27;s interesting to you then it&#x27;s worth posting, and letting the voting system do it&#x27;s thing. I only rarely post because by the time I&#x27;ve seen something it&#x27;s usually already been posted

Tbh this is exactly the sort of thing I&#x27;d come here to see

It&#x27;s about intellectual curiosity, so it&#x27;s both.

Recently I saw a post about Bonsai trees on the front page. Making your own RAM is 100% more relevant to HN than quite a few posts I see on the main page.

Yeah we need 20 more LLM submissions instead, that&#x27;s the hard hitting content. &#x2F;s

I saw this video yesterday and considered posting it, but I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate for HN.This channel has another video where it shows how the clean room lab is created starting from a basic backyard shed, and that was truly astounding. The positive pressure to keep the number of particles low in someone’s backyard is almost mystical to me.

2027. Upgrade your LLM with home made RAM so you can afford to have it design your flying car

2030. All flying cars are actually armed drones - homefab is outlawed

2027. Just-in-time built software and hardware.

<pre><code> 1999. We will have flying cars
 2024. LLMs - there will be robots
 2026. How to make your own RAM</code></pre>

I know how to spell &quot;speed&quot; and &quot;grid&quot;. Honest!

You measure the charge (if it is there) before it is completely gone (if it were ever there). Capacitors always leak, these capacitors leak fast.Measuring the charge also removes some of the charge -- fast, compared to the leak spead.DRAM chips have a circuit that writes the value back -- charges the capacitor up if there&#x27;s supposed to be a charge, drains it if there&#x27;s not supposed to be a charge.Refreshes and normal reads are the same, except that normal reads sends the value(s) to the output pin(s) on the chip.He has &quot;only&quot; shown the basic grid of capacitors and transistors. The chip he shown has no circuit to measure charges or to write them back afterwards. This makes it easier to test the basic grip and the basic capcacitors.Pretty sure the proper read out and write back circuit comes in the next video.

A transistor effectively is an AND gate. If there is a charge on both the source and the gate, then charge can move to drain. So if you charge up the capacitor and you connect it to the source of another transistor then you can check whether it is still charged by putting a charge to the gate and see if there is charge on the drain.And you are right, that charge on the drain can then be used both to drive some logic and to activate the recharging of the capacitor that was just discharged.By the way I am being handwavy about &quot;charge&quot; moving about, if you really want to learn the electronics it is more correct to call it a voltage relative to some ground that the charge always moves towards.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dynamic_random-access_memory#Principles_of_operation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dynamic_random-access_memory#P...</a>It turns out they intentionally drain a bit of the storage capacitor, and amplify that weak signal. Some of that amplified charge is then fed back to storage.

In the &quot;real&quot; DRAM chip, there is a large array of very tiny capacitors, with the switches which allow to connect one row of the array at a time to the readout column wires.The capacitance of the wires themselves is typically an order of magnitude greater than that of the storage capacitors. So when the memory is read, the wires are first precharged to some standard voltage. Then the desired row of storage capacitors is connected to the wires, and the charges from the storage capacitors spread onto the wires, changing their voltages very slightly. These voltage deviations from the standard value are amplified by the &quot;sense amplifiers&quot;. The amplifiers are sort of like flip-flops. Once they start in a state which &quot;tilts&quot; slightly to &quot;zero&quot; or slightly to &quot;one&quot;, they go all the way to the full magnitude zeros and ones. This not only amplifies the signal, but also automatically brings the voltages on the wires and the still connected to them capacitors to the full magnitude, thus &quot;refreshing&quot; the data. The row is disconnected, and the next read cycle can start for some other row.In the video, an array of 4x5 capacitors and the associated with them switches was fabricated. The capacitors in the video are several hundred times larger (12400 fF) than typical capacitors in a 64 Kbit DRAM (about 50 fF). I assume this is done so that in the later episodes the author could implement the readout electronics outside of the chip.

&gt; I still don&#x27;t really get transistors :P,The important bits here are:- any two conductive plates close together with an insulator between make a capacitor (1)- when a capacitor is charged, the energy goes into the electric FIELD- that&#x27;s the FIELD of the field effect transistor- if the field is strong enough, that causes conduction between source and drain (along the &quot;channel&quot;)- the insulator is nanometers thick, so current leaks across it; at that scale, you can detect individual electrons quantum teleporting straight through it.(1) technically like gravity there is a capacitance between any two objects in the universe, but it&#x27;s only significant when you have relatively wide and close conductors

So, I get that we charge the capacitor up, and that it leaks so we must recharge it periodically. I don&#x27;t get two things:1. How is the value read? Is it reading the leak?2. How is recharging done? I guess the leak itself (assuming my guess in 1. holds) could provide charge for some logic that checks &quot;if has charge then recharge else nop&quot;.I still don&#x27;t really get transistors :P, but this was cool.

It&#x27;s really easy to set up a manufacturing process for basically anything if you can spend 100x per unit compared to the big optimized factories and you don&#x27;t mind the product being a lot slower.The clean room isn&#x27;t the hard part about being competitive. It&#x27;s using advanced lithography to cram billions of cells into a single chip. If you want make DDR2 chips on a 90 nanometer process, that is accessible to a whole lot of companies, but nobody will buy the product. And in the micrometer range you can DIY like this guy.

I&#x27;m not really sure what you mean by &quot;certified&quot;; I don&#x27;t think JEDEC are handing out stickers. Although I am reminded of the Bunnie Huang article about SD cards, where the Shenzen vendor would give you the same SD card with the manufacturer logo + holographic authenticity .. of your choice.The real problem with the RAM business is that it was commodified; normally manufacturers make a relatively small margin. No incentive to build a factory for that. These are not normal times because (a) someone has bought all the RAM and (b) someone has blown up a whole load of globally critical infrastructure in the Middle East.The risk the existing RAM manufacturers are being cautious about is the risk of normal: if you start building a factory now, will you be selling into a RAM glut?

&gt; what exactly is stopping any company from doing this themselves and breaking into the RAM business?nothing, except the terrible yields that they would obtain, and the lack of scale making the entire enterprise not profit generating (as the amount of profit per sale is too low if it even is positive, but you can&#x27;t set it higher as there&#x27;s cheaper, &quot;better&quot; ram available from pre-established fabs that do have economies of scale).You could play the artisanal angle, and market it as home grown, organic ram. Not sure how much real buyers of ram care, but might get a few hobbyists in the market.

You can make eDRAM using logic processes (which are currently less bottlenecked than RAM, at least for non cutting-edge nodes) but the cost is still prohibitive compared to specialty DRAM processes (even when considering the recent increase in DRAM prices). If you were doing that, you&#x27;d want to use it for compute-in-memory instead, which basically pushes NUMA to an extreme of having lots of tiny cores each with direct access to its own local DRAM.

i assume the reason is that this is a very competitive market and you need hundreds of billions in investment to just start producing at a competitive quality and price, with massive uncertainty that you will be able to make that money backi mean, you&#x27;d think if someone is willing to through 60B (or 10B for an option to buy at a 60B valuation) at Cursor, then other people would give it a shot at starting a SotA semiconductor fab, but apparently the profit expectations are not there

Jokes aside, seeing as this person has created their own clean room in a shed, and is making RAM, what exactly is stopping any company from doing this themselves and breaking into the RAM business?I&#x27;d pay less for RAM that wasn&#x27;t &quot;certified&quot; in some official way, at least it works.

You have to surrender your silicon(e) to the state!

Chairman Trump will have a semiconductor furnace in every backyard.

I&#x27;m not sure this is what they meant when they said they wanted to bring manufacturing back to the USA lol

This is the most pathological technology I have heard of in a long time and I am not even going to apologize for upvoting and telling other people about the evil genius I found on the internet today.

How about swap on pingfs so you aren&#x27;t relying on some cloud provider?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yarrick&#x2F;pingfs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;yarrick&#x2F;pingfs</a>

Actually possible if you mount google drive and move your swap file there.

I was thinking... will x402 protocol make it super easy for scammers to commit such frauds in future? By tricking online searches done by LLM&#x27;s to trick them into spending money?

If they put a pricing page, I think there would be someone who would buy it, especially nowadays when with embedded llms there is a huge hunger for RAM (as well as CPU). :))

With memory prices what they are maybe there is a business opportunity for a return of SoftRAM 95

&quot;There is no DownloadMoreRAM, it&#x27;s just some guy in a backyard shed.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downloadmoreram.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;downloadmoreram.com&#x2F;</a>

And are doing exceptional things (like building their own cleanroom in a shed)

Content creation was always about content. If you can make something special and engaging, audience will come.

What are you talking about? The video is free on YouTube. Patreon is just another way of supporting the channel beyond the usual ad-sense, sponsors, etc.No one is expecting them to make a fortune over night, but it at least shows there is space for new people. This video was actually push into my feed by youtube which is rare for new creators. So they clearly are doing pretty well in the grand scheme of things.

Is it? Looks like this video is &quot;locked&quot; on Patreon requiring &quot;this post and more exclusive work. Join for $10&#x2F;month&quot; yet got, as of now, 329 611 views ... so are they just making $3M&#x2F;month or is it not really working?

This guy is proof that newcomers to YouTube can still succeed, if they find the right niche.

Backyard semiconductor production is pretty similar to backyard barbecue. Lots of heating, smoking (diffusion), injecting (ion implant), and layering..

Great time to get into the shed business!

They will preemptively rent all the sheds in the usa.

Nobody tell openai about this, they’ll buy up all his stock

Of course it not easy. He spent $20k on materials and a good amount of elbow grease just to construct this one room. In order to maintain the clean environment the air circulation runs 24&#x2F;7 and he washes all the surfaces daily using cleanroom wipes. Deionized water system provides water for washing the cleanroom gowns. It is a lot of work just to have a small facility at home for odd jobs.

There&#x27;s another video on YouTube by the same guy detailing how he built his backyard clean room shed. I was kind of surprised at how easy it was - it&#x27;s definitely a construction project that requires some specialized knowledge, but the fact that it&#x27;s tractable at all for one person with a shed is pretty amazing to me.

I wasn&#x27;t expecting what the inside of the shed would be like!

It is not really feasible to fabricate usable integrated circuits at home. There is a huge difference between a one off demonstration of a principle that &quot;sort of works&quot;, and perfecting the process to the point that it produces finished parts that can be relied on.This guy is not exactly a regular person. He is a pretty unique case of a talented semiconductor engineer who has a home lab for side hassles. It is not a low effort thing. He runs the equipment 24&#x2F;7, scrubs all the surfaces in the lab daily to keep it clean.Still, with the lab and all of the equipment already at hand, it cost him several weeks of work to produce this demonstration of transistors and capacitors, which kind of work, but are still long ways from a &quot;completely complete&quot; 20 bit DRAM chip.Unfortunately it is simply too much work for one person to maintain a viable semiconductor fabrication process, even when it is done semi-professionally.

That is really not the takeaway from this video, at all.

Makes me wonder if in the far future it will be ever possible to do something crazy like 7nm processes at home

Technologies that were considered &quot;high-tech&quot; 20-30 years ago are now accessible to regular people. Making DRAM. I remember a video recently of a guy making his own floppy disks.
Next I expect people to manufacture integrated circuits that have been discontinued. Like the Z80

Mom: We have RAM at home!RAM at home:

The furnace is a low cost off-the-shelf Chinese product from Anhui Beq Equipment Technology Co.Much more impressive are the modifications to the microscope, transforming it into an improvised lithography machine, and the home made plasma etching machine, cobbled together from surplus components.Of course, the whole thing, starting from the clean room, is extremely impressive -- Intel started their business in a much simpler facility.

This is incredible! 1100 degrees in your backyard shed! And the video explains it well too

I&#x27;m still to own a shed. The best I have is an apartment with no garden.

Oh man my shed could never be this clean

Subscribed. Genuinely looking forward to what this gent gets up to.

You&#x27;re telling me we can free download more RAM now?

nowadays, we need cheap ram solutions :&#x27;)

We need to be able to make semiconductors at home for computing freedom to be preserved the way the world is going.

2 bytes of memory ought to be enough for anyone!

The graphs towards the end were discharge curves for a single transistor&#x2F;capacitor cell out of only 16 present, if I understood correctly? So &quot;enough cells to count as memory&quot; and &quot;addressing logic&quot; are definitely future work (it looked like he wanted to characterize what the refresh cycle would have to look like before actually building more.) I was kind of surprised that the &quot;use a microscope as a photolithography projector&quot; approach worked at all, it will be interesting to see how that scales up...

Spoiler: we never actually get to see the RAM tested

such good idea ( so called home made )

Photolithography is way more practical, 3d printing principles are already used here in stepping of the mask.

Considering how AI companies and older hardware manufacturing
companies are driving up the RAM prices - thus, milking all of
us ultimately - I think 3D printing needs to become the new
default. And affordable too, eventually (it already is, for
cheap things, e. g. plastics or PLA based printing, this is
often much cheaper than ordering this from a company, but I
mean with regards to computer systems too. Naturally right now
we are far away from the nanoscale here, but I see this simply
as a situation that will change eventually, given enough time).Those AI companies and hardware manufacturers lost all right to
further dictate and increase prices. Capitalism does not work
as de-facto blackmail monopoly - or should not. If a state fails
to protect the people, such as in the USA right now under the
orange king, then the people need to insist on change. ALL
steps against this tyranny from a few superrich needs to end.Right now the legislation is going in the way how lobbyists
want this, e. g. trying to make 3D printing illegal, but I
think technology will obsolete such illegal laws eventually.
Tyranny will eventually fail.

Making RAM at Home [video]