Making RAM at Home [video]
youtube.com222 points by kaipereira a day ago
222 points by kaipereira a day ago
I only buy free-range artisanal DRAM at the DRAM farmer's market.
Admit it, deep down, our inner engeering child also wants to build a semiconductor clean room ;)
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.
Knowing that really helps you understand just how valuable semiconductors are as a product.
I only have raw RAM, pastured RAM is wrong.
I get my DRAM needs at the RAM ranch.
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.
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
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.
In a comment he says he is doing it for some research into a related thing (somethiing to do with GaN sheets?)
Agree with the sentiment, but “news for nerds” is Slashdot.
Slashdot still exists?
Well, “exists” is a pretty broad spectrum.
I miss the comment tagging system: insightful, informative, interesting, funny. It would make sense for hn.
Yeah but it's a YouTube video. Those tend not to do super well on the front page.
If you haven't seen this one, I highly recommend it:
Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4&t=2070s
It's quite old but I think there is no modern version of it.
I've tried posting to HN a few times but it hasn't gained traction for some reason, but I find it absolutely mind blowing.
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.
I think if it's interesting to you then it's worth posting, and letting the voting system do it's thing. I only rarely post because by the time I've seen something it's usually already been posted
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.
1999. We will have flying cars
2024. LLMs - there will be robots
2026. How to make your own RAM"There is no DownloadMoreRAM, it's just some guy in a backyard shed."
Actually possible if you mount google drive and move your swap file there.
With memory prices what they are maybe there is a business opportunity for a return of SoftRAM 95
I'm not sure this is what they meant when they said they wanted to bring manufacturing back to the USA lol
This guy is proof that newcomers to YouTube can still succeed, if they find the right niche.
Is it? Looks like this video is "locked" on Patreon requiring "this post and more exclusive work. Join for $10/month" yet got, as of now, 329 611 views ... so are they just making $3M/month or is it not really working?
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.
So, I get that we charge the capacitor up, and that it leaks so we must recharge it periodically. I don'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 "if has charge then recharge else nop".
I still don't really get transistors :P, but this was cool.
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 "charge" 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random-access_memory#P...
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.
Backyard semiconductor production is pretty similar to backyard barbecue. Lots of heating, smoking (diffusion), injecting (ion implant), and layering..
I wasn't expecting what the inside of the shed would be like!
There'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's definitely a construction project that requires some specialized knowledge, but the fact that it's tractable at all for one person with a shed is pretty amazing to me.
Mom: We have RAM at home!
RAM at home:
Nobody tell openai about this, they’ll buy up all his stock
Subscribed. Genuinely looking forward to what this gent gets up to.
This is incredible! 1100 degrees in your backyard shed! And the video explains it well too
We need to be able to make semiconductors at home for computing freedom to be preserved the way the world is going.
Spoiler: we never actually get to see the RAM tested
The graphs towards the end were discharge curves for a single transistor/capacitor cell out of only 16 present, if I understood correctly? So "enough cells to count as memory" and "addressing logic" 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 "use a microscope as a photolithography projector" approach worked at all, it will be interesting to see how that scales up...