Hacker News

kaipereira
Making RAM at Home [video] youtube.com

readitalready3 hours ago

I only buy free-range artisanal DRAM at the DRAM farmer's market.

keysersoze33an hour ago

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

readitalready35 minutes ago

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.

takihito22 minutes ago

Knowing that really helps you understand just how valuable semiconductors are as a product.

intothemildan hour ago

I only have raw RAM, pastured RAM is wrong.

I get my DRAM needs at the RAM ranch.

ramesh31an hour ago

>I get my DRAM needs at the RAM ranch.

18GB at a time

LPisGood3 hours ago

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.

vlovich1233 hours ago

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

LPisGood2 hours ago

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.

grandinj33 minutes ago

In a comment he says he is doing it for some research into a related thing (somethiing to do with GaN sheets?)

kstrauser3 hours ago

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

midnitewarrior2 hours ago

Their standard is higher than that, "Stuff that matters."

SkinTaco3 hours ago

Slashdot still exists?

kstrauser2 hours ago

Well, “exists” is a pretty broad spectrum.

benob30 minutes ago

I miss the comment tagging system: insightful, informative, interesting, funny. It would make sense for hn.

fragmede2 hours ago

Yeah but it's a YouTube video. Those tend not to do super well on the front page.

pts_an hour ago

Just gimme the transcripts for a speed read

saganus3 hours ago

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.

jamiek8834 minutes ago

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.

anitil3 hours ago

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

duskdozer3 hours ago

Tbh this is exactly the sort of thing I'd come here to see

waterTanuki3 hours ago

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.

p0w3n3d2 hours ago

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

jukkan2 hours ago

"There is no DownloadMoreRAM, it's just some guy in a backyard shed."

https://downloadmoreram.com/

RobotToasteran hour ago

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

treebeard9012 hours ago

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

apatheticonionan hour ago

I'm not sure this is what they meant when they said they wanted to bring manufacturing back to the USA lol

RobotToasteran hour ago

Chairman Trump will have a semiconductor furnace in every backyard.

apatheticonion31 minutes ago

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

dlcarriera day ago

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

utopiah31 minutes ago

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?

jcattle42 minutes ago

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

ivanjermakov42 minutes ago

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

the-smug-onean hour ago

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.

tinco43 minutes ago

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.

tooltoweran hour ago

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.

[deleted]an hour agocollapsed

readitalready3 hours ago

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

Rendelloa day ago

I wasn't expecting what the inside of the shed would be like!

JuniperMesos2 hours ago

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.

debo_3 hours ago

Mom: We have RAM at home!

RAM at home:

kennywinker2 hours ago

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

ReptileManan hour ago

They will preemptively rent all the sheds in the usa.

schmeichel4 hours ago

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

jandhdhshhh2 hours ago

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

ReptileManan hour ago

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

CamperBob23 hours ago

Spoiler: we never actually get to see the RAM tested

eichin3 hours ago

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...

denkmoon3 hours ago

2 bytes of memory ought to be enough for anyone!

josephg2 hours ago

The Atari 2600 only had 128 bytes of ram. It’s not that far off…

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