This 22-year-old builds chips in his parents? garage

His second chip has 200 times as many transistors as his first, a growth rate outpacing Moore’s law, the rule of thumb coined by an Intel cofounder that says the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years.Zeloof now hopes to match the scale of Intel’s breakthrough 4004 chip from 1971, the first commercial microprocessor, which had 2,300 transistors and was used in calculators and other business machines. “That really high barrier to entry will make you super risk-averse, and that’s bad for innovation,” Zeloof says.Zeloof started down the path to making his own chips as a high school junior, in 2016. This is a garage,” says Mark Rothman, who has spent 40 years in chip engineering and now works at a company making technology for OLED screens. Then his homemade photolithography machine beamed on his design: a grid of 12 circuits, each with 100 transistors (and a dancing bear), 1,200 transistors in all.Zeloof’s first chip, the Z1, was made in 2018 when he was still in high school and has six transistors.His second chip, the Z2, was finished in August 2021 and has 1,200 transistors.Zeloof is working on the Z3, a chip that will be capable of adding 1 + 1, as a step to a full microprocessor.Each chip was then etched with acid and cooked in a furnace at about 1,000 degrees Celsius to bake in phosphorus atoms to adjust its conductivity. “But the chips are still made in a big factory somewhere,” Zeloof says. Ellsworth says chip technology seen as outdated to leading fabs can still be useful to engineers.Zeloof recently upgraded his photolithography machine to print details as small as about 0.3 microns, or 300 nanometers—roughly on par with the commercial chip industry in the mid-'90s.