Comment by K0balt

I’d love this to be true but the tech involved is Sci-fi level stuff. Neutron beams used to chop off atomically perfect slices of giant silicon crystals and wacky stuff like that.

TBF garage fabs -are- a thing but it’s in the hundreds of nanometers scale. Thin film technology is also promising for low tech tape outs, but neither of those is going to be practical for anything better than 1980/90s tech. A modern die would be in the square meters range on those process densities, and could never achieve ghz speeds.

That said, there are a ton of scrappy companies sending out designs to 30-100nm scale fabs, companies with 5-10 employees cranking out cool designs and custom silicon… but they are still sending their tape-outs to giant companies to fab, just on their old, obsolete machines.

Silicon foundries are incredibly capital intensive, and short SOTA process lifespans burn through that investment at a frantic pace.