A homemade 1000+ transistor array integrated circuit!
In 2018, Sam Zeloof made the first homemade integrated circuits in a garage fab. Sam was a senior in high school when making the Z1 amplifier, and now as a senior in college, there are some improvements to the amateur silicon process.
The Z1 had 6 transistors and was a great test chip to develop all the processes and equipment. The Z2 has 100 transistors on a 10µm polysilicon gate process – same technology as Intel’s first processor. My chip is a simple 10×10 array of transistors to test, characterize, and tweak the process but this is a huge step closer to more advanced DIY computer chips. The Intel 4004 has 2,200 transistors and I’ve now made 1,200 on the same piece of silicon.
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