A 23-year-old boy has emulated the legendary Intel 4004 with a 1,200-transistor chip made in his garage

On By Garmin Philip

In 1971 Intel created its Intel 4004, the first commercial processor. It consisted of 2,300 transistors and was used in calculators. 50 years later a 23-year-old boy has managed to create a chip with 1,200 transistors, and the amazing thing is that he has done it from the garage of his house and with old equipment that he has managed to buy at a bargain price.

Sam Zeloof already created a more basic chip in 2018, and since then he has been moving forward to now create a new development that is light years away from modern Intel chips, but that demonstrates something striking: today almost anyone can make a modest chip at home with time, effort and a small investment.

home walking chips

Zeelof’s interest in this field began in 2016, when he saw and YouTube how inventor and entrepreneur Jeri Ellsworth created her own “household” transistors. Zeelof wanted to replicate the project, but taking it even further: wanted to go from transistors to integrated circuits, a leap that took a decade to come in the history of these developments last century.

To accomplish this, Zeelof pored over patents and textbooks from the 1960s and 1970s that explained how pioneers like Fairchild Semiconductors they managed to make their chips.

The children of Fairchild Semiconductor: from the 'eight traitors' to the germ of today's Silicon Valley

I needed, yes, certain technical equipment. It was not a question here of dealing with the enormous and very special machines of ASML, but of taking advantage of vestiges of the past. He bought an old electron microscope on eBay for $1,000. — its price in the early 1990s was around $250,000 — but he also devised a method of taking advantage of photolithographic systems, something he accomplished with a conference room projector that he modified for his needs.

This allowed him to develop his first chip, an amplifier with only six transistors that was a project for the institute. It was called “Z1”. In August 2021 he managed to create the Z2, which went much further and integrated 1,200 transistors.

Zeelof explained the whole process on your blog, and there he confessed something curious: “now we know that it is possible to create really good transistors with impure chemical elements, without a “clean room” and with domestic equipment.”

At the end of his story he confessed that his process “is not ideal”, but “it simplifies manufacturing and makes it possible with a minimum set of tools”. The chip may not be of any really practical use at this point, but the achievement is amazing taking into account the means at his disposal.

By the way, its ‘twelve Z2’ may not yet be up to the legendary Intel 4004, but Zeloof – which anyone can support on his Patreon page– yes is preparing your next milestone: has already developed a design capable of performing basic addition, a new, small and important step that will allow him to make a much more versatile microprocessor. It will still be far from today’s microprocessors, but hey, it will have been done in the garage at home. Nothing bad.

Via | Wired



Reference-www.xataka.com