Followed a couple of links and ended up on his brother's page, reading about another example of the anti-immigrant insanity that's taken hold of this country: https://adam.zeloof.xyz/2025/04/01/karim/ . So sad.
I’m curious on the details. Isn’t marrying a citizen an instant path to residency and presumably rather quick way to get authorized for work? Are they holding him for having previously been in the states on an expired visa?
Replicating late 70s chip fab in one's parents' garage. Incredible honestly, given that the microprocessor is probably the most complex human invention.
The timing of this share is crazy, since I was just looking around a few days ago to see if there were any guides or even kits for doing photolithography at home. It's part of my mission to demystify modern technology for my kids. I couldn't find anything, so this is excellent to see. Far too complex for my kids ages, but it might be cool to replicate at least part of this amazing project when they're older.
Silk screen printing is probably the easiest way to introduce the concepts to kids. There are a lot of maker spaces/artist collectives and classes that have the basic tools and resources to do it.
This is impressive work. Every time I see hobbyist-scale semiconductor projects, it reminds me how much innovation still happens outside big labs. Curious how far this approach can scale.
The semiconductor device industry and Silicon Valley would have never appeared if the early companies working in this field would have been controlled by people obsessed about secrecy and "IP protection".
During the fifties and the sixties, and even until the early seventies, it was common for everyone to publish research papers very unlike those that are published today, where the concrete information is minimal.
In the early research papers about semiconductor devices and integrated circuits, it was normal to give complete recipes, including quantities of chemicals, temperatures and times for the processing steps and so on. After reading such papers, you could reproduce the recipes and make the device described and you could measure for yourself to see how true are the claims presented in the paper.
That open sharing of information has led to a very quick evolution of the semiconductor technologies during the early years, until more traditional business-oriented management has begun to restrict the information provided to the public.
It is said that such sharing of information still exists in China in many fields, and it is the source of their rapid progress.
Awesome! I wouldn't have thought that it is possible to make ICs in a garage. Of course it requires a lot of knowledge, etc. But still, not a multi-billion dollar clean room with specialist equipment.
You could make in a garage some decent analog integrated circuits, e.g. audio amplifiers or operational amplifiers or even radio-frequency circuits for not too high frequency ranges.
However you cannot make useful digital circuits. For digital circuits, the best that you can do is to be content to only design them and buy an FPGA for implementing them, instead of attempting to manufacture a custom IC.
With the kind of digital circuits that you could make in a garage, the most complex thing that you could do would be something like a very big table or wall digital clock, made not with a single IC like today, but with a few dozen ICs.
Anything more complex than that would need far too many ICs.
oh man, I remember hearing about this back then and I got excited that there had been an update. From what I hear he’s gone off to college now but will hopefully be back to cooking up semiconductors once he graduates
Although this is in 2021, it's great to see that Sam Zeloof also made Atomic Semi [0].
A display of "just doing things", no permission needed and no need for barriers and red tape.
It is another reason why I have huge promise for Substrate [1] founded by James Proud (UK native moved to US) another display of "just doing things".
However in Europe and the UK, it's "this law allows you to do this, this and this", "we've changed the law, here is a massive immediate fine", "ban encryption" (this nearly happened), "ban maths", "we are the first to regulate and ban this".
It is no wonder the US will continue to be great at building things.
Followed a couple of links and ended up on his brother's page, reading about another example of the anti-immigrant insanity that's taken hold of this country: https://adam.zeloof.xyz/2025/04/01/karim/ . So sad.
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