Hobbyist produces integrated circuit with ‘home lithography’

The hobbyist Sam Zeloof has made an integrated circuit in his garage based on home-garden-and-kitchen lithography. Zeloof has yet to announce the details about the production, but he has been working on starting his own home fab for some time.

The chip that Zeloof has made is a differential amplifier based on pmos circuitry. The student, who was 17 years old at least last December, has collected numerous devices in his garage in Flemington in the US to produce chips himself.

“I started reading old books and patents because the new books describe processes that require very expensive devices,” he told Spectrum last year. He started making his own transistors after seeing the work of Jeri Ellsworth, who posts her circuit hobby work on her YouTube channel. The goal of Zeloof is to create a clone of Intel’s 4004 microprocessor from 1971.

Zeloof promises to publish the details of his lithography work on his site and to come up with more images and test results once he has a wirebonder to connect to. On his site, the student already describes how he made a lithography stepper based on a DLP beamer and an old Nikon microscope, with a resolution of 250nm and a 365nm light source.