News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Librem 5 Phone Dogwood Thermals and Battery Life by ignoramous on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @04:56PM (#23980611)
Sounds like the silicon fabrication industry is ripe for disruption ala Stripe / Monzo. May be, since you know so much, you should build one. :)

You spoke of the Basebands...that reminded me that Fabrice Bellard works on the other side of the equation [0]. May be, if we are lucky, he turns his attention to fixing mobile phones [1].

[0] https://www.amarisoft.com/about-us/

[1] https://osmocom.org/projects/baseband

Re:Librem 5 Phone Dogwood Thermals and Battery Life by akiselev on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @05:27PM (#23980881)
I wish! I've actually looked into it and there's lots of interesting work in academia and garages on small scale, low cost silicon fab [1] as well as the electron microscopy necessary to do quality control [2]. Last I checked the state of the art was using regular microscopes with Texas Instruments digital micromirror devices from projectors with basic photoresist and etchant. The DMD reflects light from your light source onto the wafer with the resist and you can control the micromirrors like pixels to only reflect light at the pixels you want to expose the resist. The doping is doable with basic vapor deposition but alignment between steps is brutally hard and the doping requires a lot of tuning and environmental stability to get right so the feature limit is 1 micrometer at best.

I even found a TI 1080p UV DMD and bought a roll of lithographic film to try to get that feature size limit down. My plan was to expose the litho film instead of the wafer directly and build very precise jigs for the film off of a precision machine base I could get for a few grand, with custom built linear motors to move between steps but I got stuck on the physics and math. It looked like I had a solution using neural networks and a DIY laser interferometer as the feedback loop as a shortcut to learning control theory but then got distracted by more urgent matters... c'est la vie

[1] http://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/

[2] http://sam.zeloof.xyz/garage-electron-microscopy-first-image...

Re:Librem 5 Phone Dogwood Thermals and Battery Life by CamperBob2 on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @12:22AM (#23983489)
Some very interesting work there, reminds me of Ben Krasnow's lair. You guys should hang out!

I thought the voiceover video for the SEM lithography experiment worked really well ( https://youtu.be/SB94rQtKlKI ). How does the spot size from the SEM compare to the ~1-um resolution you get from the DMD? I assume you're not actually getting 5 nm out of it...?