[Cryptography] Build your own fab, a project for teenagers

[Bill Frantz]

For those who worry about backdoors being inserted in their chips:

Two articles, one in QST (January 2018) and one in the IEEE 
Spectrum 
<https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-high-school-student-whos-building-his-own-integrated-circuits> 
describe how Sam Zeloof, KD2ENL, age 17, has built his own 
semiconductor fabrication facility following suggestions from 
Jeri Ellsworth’s YouTube channel 
<https://www.youtube.com/user/jeriellsworth>, where she 
demonstrated how she had made some home-brew silicon 
transistors. Sam is using a 10 micrometer feature size, well 
below the current state of the art. However, surplus equipment 
for that feature size is available inexpensively. He has built a 
few transistors and is targeting building a 4004 CPU as his next project.

Cheers - Bill

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